And yet other online communities, such as Stack overflowthey have thrived.
The demise—or success—of sites like these is of interest Ahal Basabu, Kellogg professor of business. It seeks to understand how these types of online communities work, in particular, because they are a growing trend in customer service.
“A big thing that’s happening in customer support is that people have moved to self-help because they don’t want to wait in call centers,” says Bassamboo. “And the FAQ is available, but the next level is making it more dynamic so people can ask questions and others can help them.”
A wide range of businesses are launching and cultivating online communities. Some of these communities, such as Quora, host a wide range of questions and answers. others, such as Stack overflow, an online community for technology developers, targeting a specific industry. Still others, like the communities they manage apple and Microsoftthey are oriented towards the products and services sold by a particular company.
These online communities can be a boon for businesses: they can unlock user insights, reducing customer service labor costs and waiting times, while providing better answers to customer queries. But only if they stick. Like Yahoo Answers, many of these communities have languished or disappeared altogether, among others Walmart Moms and Benz generation.
Bassamboo et al Neha SharmaKellogg PhD candidate in business, and Gad Alon from the University of Pennsylvania wanted to understand the factors that lead to online community success and failure and what such forums can do to make them perform better. They define success in this context as increasing the number of users and, critically, maximizing the percentage of user questions that get answered. After all, if a community attracts a barrage of questions, but only a small fraction receives answers, the site is unlikely to flourish.
Online communities “have to balance their growing user base and make sure enough people are getting responses to maintain that base over time,” says Sharma.
Sharma, Allon and Bassamboo conducted one study— was named a finalist in the IBM Best Service Science Student Paper competition—which modeled online community dynamics to understand how changing the cost of asking a question would affect user participation and platform viability.
They found that modestly increasing the cost of questions—such as through penalties for unclear questions—improved the percentage of questions answered, making the community more sustainable. “There’s a sweet spot between too low cost and too high to ask what’s best for these communities,” says Bassamboo.
Understanding Online Communities
To shed light on the dynamics of the online community, the researchers constructed a dynamic model of such systems using concepts from game theory.
Bassamboo points out key features of the model: “There are two kinds of users who come through the door: those who come to ask questions and those who come to answer. and people who give answers can also ask questions.’
For all users, the key factor is whether participating in the community is worth their effort—the reward may be from answering a question or enjoying a good reputation as someone who provides useful answers. “The idea is that people don’t just give answers out of the goodness of their hearts,” says Bassamboo. “There has to be something in it for them.”
Therefore, changing the platform’s rules of engagement can have a large impact on community functioning and incentives for participation. Specifically, the researchers manipulated how easy it was for hypothetical users to ask a question—or “the personal cost of asking a question,” as Bassamboo puts it.
Sharma describes the different types of costs that can arise from questions: In Stack overflow, for example, “you get a violation if your question seems like a homework question or too long or complicated. In some systems you are penalized for asking a question that has already been answered. This helps users decide whether they want to ask a given question or not.” Similarly, question answerers consider the probability of their answer being considered the best, usually determined by the questioner, yielding reputation points for the answerer.
Guiding the research was a key question: How would increasing the cost of asking a question affect the health of the online community?
The cost benefit of questions
The researchers came up with a somewhat unimaginable answer.
“The intuitive guess would be that there would be a threshold cost of asking a question above which the platform would crash and below which it would survive,” says Bassamboo. “So if the cost of asking a question is very low, you should have a lot of users on the platform, but as it grows, the number of users decreases and the platform will die.”
Contrary to this linear relationship, research findings suggest a sweet spot where a moderate cost of asking questions is optimal for online community functioning. “When you raise the cost of asking questions,” Sharma says, “fewer people ask, but it increases the likelihood that a question will get answered. When people who ask get answers, they’re more satisfied and stay on the platform, and the user base becomes sustainable over time.”
Put another way, if the cost of asking questions is very small, a large number of people ask questions and this leads to a lot of competition for the attention of users who may be able to provide answers. “All questions are fighting for attention from the same finite number of people in that community,” says Sharma. “Then the likelihood of getting an answer to a particular question goes down and people drop out and stop asking questions.”
Indeed, researchers believe that the quality of the online community is largely determined by the percentage of questions answered. Bassamboo illustrates this idea with a personal example: “If I’m teaching with my kids and we Google a question, we get really excited when we find a place where someone asked the same question. But it is frustrating when you see that there is no answer to the question. It’s like the end of the road.”
The conclusion is that imposing a moderate cost for asking questions and thereby increasing the percentage of questions answered can improve the overall quality, effectiveness and sustainability of online communities.
Get answers to more questions
The findings suggest practical advice for those seeking to develop strong online communities.
“You want a community where not only good questions are asked, but good questions are answered,” says Bassamboo. “So you want to raise the bar of asking a question by penalizing weak or vague questions, resulting in more precise, specific questions. It’s worth spending some effort and energy there.”
For example, a community could go so far as to block the IP addresses of those whose questions are repeatedly deemed weak. Or a community might seek to improve the answer rate by directing questions to certain participants who are more likely to give a good answer. “If the system knows you might have the answer, it should be structured to match your questions,” says Bassamboo.
Sharma notes another, even more effective way that high-profile communities boost response rates: “On Apple’s platform, the cost of asking questions is not very high. So they spent some money putting their own representatives on the platform to answer more difficult questions. This avoids the situation where people with difficult questions never get an answer because they’ve never been seen by someone knowledgeable enough to answer them.”