How individual behaviors drive inequality in online community sizes: an agent-based simulation

TL;DR

This paper uses agent-based simulations to explore how individual social behaviors like exposure and benefit expectations influence the extreme inequality in online community sizes, specifically on Reddit.

Contribution

It demonstrates that combining social exposure and benefit-based decision processes in simulations reproduces realistic community size distributions, bridging individual behavior and group-level patterns.

Findings

Both social exposure and benefit-based decisions are necessary to generate realistic community size distributions.

Simulations show that neither process alone suffices to explain size inequality.

Agent-based modeling effectively evaluates social theories in online communities.

Abstract

Why are online community sizes so extremely unequal? Most answers to this question have pointed to general mathematical processes drawn from physics like cumulative advantage. These explanations provide little insight into specific social dynamics or decisions that individuals make when joining and leaving communities. In addition, explanations in terms of cumulative advantage do not draw from the enormous body of social computing research that studies individual behavior. Our work bridges this divide by testing whether two influential social mechanisms used to explain community joining can also explain the distribution of community sizes. Using agent-based simulations, we evaluate how well individual-level processes of social exposure and decisions based on individual expected benefits reproduce empirical community size data from Reddit. Our simulations contribute to social computing theory by providing evidence that both processes together---but neither alone---generate realistic distributions of community sizes. Our results also illustrate the potential value of agent-based simulation to online community researchers to both evaluate and bridge individual and group-level theories.