The Cost of Collaboration for Code and Art: Evidence from a Remixing Community

TL;DR

This study examines how collaboration affects the quality of creative and functional works in an online remixing community, finding that collaborations often receive lower ratings, especially for artistic projects.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence from a large online community showing that collaboration does not always lead to higher quality, especially for artistic works, challenging common assumptions.

Findings

Collaborative projects tend to receive lower peer ratings than individual works.

Code-heavy collaborations are rated higher than media-heavy ones.

Collaboration's impact on quality varies by the type of work.

Abstract

In this paper, we use evidence from a remixing community to evaluate two pieces of common wisdom about collaboration. First, we test the theory that jointly produced works tend to be of higher quality than individually authored products. Second, we test the theory that collaboration improves the quality of functional works like code, but that it works less well for artistic works like images and sounds. We use data from Scratch, a large online community where hundreds of thousands of young users share and remix millions of animations and interactive games. Using peer-ratings as a measure of quality, we estimate a series of fitted regression models and find that collaborative Scratch projects tend to receive ratings that are lower than individually authored works. We also find that code-intensive collaborations are rated higher than media-intensive efforts. We conclude by discussing the limitations and implications of these findings.