Behavior Toward Newcomers and Contributions to Online Communities

In this paper, we study whether and how behavior toward newcomers impacts their socialization outcomes in terms of retention and the quality of contributions in online communities. By exploiting a natural experiment on a large deal-sharing platform, we found that an intervention that proactively reminds other community members to be more considerate of newcomers caused newcomer deals to receive 54% more comments and increased the positive sentiment of the comments. The newcomers in the treatment group were 10% more likely than newcomers in the non-treatment group to post another deal, suggesting an increase in retention. However, we did not observe any effect of the intervention on the quality of subsequent contributions. Our evidence suggests that the intervention merely caused a temporary shock to newcomers’ first contributions but did not improve their learning or motivate greater effort in subsequent contributions. We draw implications on the design of socialization processes to help communities improve the retention and performance of newcomers.