The Role of Diverse Strategies in Sustainable Knowledge Production

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how different user strategies in online communities like StackExchange impact sustainable knowledge production, highlighting the importance of maintaining a balance between simple and challenging task performers.

Contribution

It introduces a novel attention network model to classify user strategies and demonstrates the critical ratio of user types needed for community sustainability.

Findings

Type A users perform maintenance with simple tasks

Type B users invest in challenging tasks

A 2:1 ratio of Type A to Type B users supports sustainable growth

Abstract

Online communities are becoming increasingly important as platforms for large-scale human cooperation. These communities allow users seeking and sharing professional skills to solve problems collaboratively. To investigate how users cooperate to complete a large number of knowledge-producing tasks, we analyze StackExchange, one of the largest question and answer systems in the world. We construct attention networks to model the growth of 110 communities in the StackExchange system and quantify individual answering strategies using the linking dynamics of attention networks. We identify two types of users taking different strategies. One strategy (type A) aims at performing maintenance by doing simple tasks, while the other strategy (type B) aims investing time in doing challenging tasks. We find that the number of type A needs to be twice as big as type B users for a sustainable growth of communities.