Tell me who its founders are and I'll tell you what your online community looks like: Online community founders' personality and community attributes

TL;DR

This study investigates how the personality traits of online community founders influence community attributes and sustainability, using a novel tool to analyze social media text from thousands of Reddit founders.

Contribution

It introduces a method to estimate founders' Big Five personality traits from social media text and links these traits to community sustainability and characteristics.

Findings

Founder traits predict community engagement levels.

Founder activity correlates with community sustainability.

Community social network structure relates to founder personality.

Abstract

Online communities are an increasingly important stakeholder for firms, and despite the growing body of research on them, much remains to be learned about them and about the factors that determine their attributes and sustainability. Whereas most of the literature focuses on predictors such as community activity, network structure, and platform interface, there is little research about behavioral and psychological aspects of community members and leaders. In the present study we focus on the personality traits of community founders as predictors of community attributes and sustainability. We develop a tool to estimate community members' Big Five personality traits from their social media text and use it to estimate the traits of 35,164 founders in 8,625 Reddit communities. We find support for most of our predictions about the relationships between founder traits and community sustainability and attributes, including the level of engagement within the community, aspects of its social network structure, and whether the founders themselves remain active in it.