The life and death of online groups: predicting group growth and longevity

We pose a fundamental question in understanding how to identify and design successful communities: What factors predict whether a community will grow and survive in the long term? Social scientists have addressed this question extensively by analyzing offline groups which endeavor to attract new members, such as social movements, finding that new individuals are influenced strongly by their ties to members of the group. As a result, prior work on the growth of communities has treated growth primarily as a diffusion processes, leading to findings about group evolution which can be difficult to explain. The proliferation of online social networks and communities, however, has created new opportunities to study, at a large scale and with very fine resolution, the mechanisms which lead to the formation, growth, and demise of online groups. In this paper, we analyze data from several thousand online social networks built on the Ning platform with the goal of understanding the factors...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: WSDM
• Authors: Sanjay Ram Kairam, Dan J. Wang, Jure Leskovec
• Keywords: Data Mining, Group Evolution, Network Constraints, Online Social Networks, WSDM 2012