text: 463,2,1435417799665537026,16614440,Jeremy Foote,"🚨 New paper🚨 This was fun to work on. @sohwng and I argue that small communities deserve more attention, so we interviewed users in small subreddits. See the thread from @sohwng (and read the whole paper at <LINK>) but I wanted to highlight two findings: <LINK> 1. We found that small communities help to partition the information space - giving people control of what they see and _who_ they interact with. 2. This one is what we *didn't* find. I thought we'd find that people participated in small communities because it was easier to make friends. But that was really rare - even in communities of a few hundred people, people didn't really know each other personally (or seek to). There was still a sense of belonging, of being part of a tribe and of sharing personal experiences; these just didn't often lead to one-to-one-relationships. @sohwng called this being interested in ""the personal but not the person"" There's a lot more to the paper, and @sohwng or I would love to talk more about it. Finally, @sohwng was an amazing first author and the driver of this project. She is doing lots of other amazing work that you'll be hearing about soon. You should definitely follow her here and on Google Scholar, and you should read and cite our paper! :)",https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.04282,"Many benefits of online communities---such as obtaining new information, opportunities, and social connections---increase with size. Thus, a ``successful'' online community often evokes an image of hundreds of thousands of users, and practitioners and researchers alike have sought to devise methods to achieve growth and thereby, success. On the other hand, small online communities exist in droves and many persist in their smallness over time. Turning to the highly popular discussion website Reddit, which is made up of hundreds of thousands of communities, we conducted a qualitative interview study examining how and why people participate in these persistently small communities, in order to understand why these communities exist when popular approaches would assume them to be failures. Drawing from twenty interviews, this paper makes several contributions: we describe how small communities provide unique informational and interactional spaces for participants, who are drawn by the hyperspecific aspects of the community; we find that small communities do not promote strong dyadic interpersonal relationships but rather promote group-based identity; and we highlight how participation in small communities is part of a broader, ongoing strategy to curate participants' online experience. We argue that online communities can be seen as nested niches: parts of an embedded, complex, symbiotic socio-informational ecosystem. We suggest ways that social computing research could benefit from more deliberate considerations of interdependence between diverse scales of online community sizes. ",Why do people participate in small online communities?,6,"['🚨 New paper🚨\nThis was fun to work on. @sohwng and I argue that small communities deserve more attention,  so we interviewed users in small subreddits.\n\nSee the thread from @sohwng (and read the whole paper at <LINK>) but I wanted to highlight two findings: <LINK>', '1. We found that small communities help to partition the information space - giving people control of what they see and _who_ they interact with.', ""2. This one is what we *didn't* find. I thought we'd find that people participated in small communities because it was easier to make friends. But that was really rare - even in communities of a few hundred people, people didn't really know each other personally (or seek to)."", 'There was still a sense of belonging, of being part of a tribe and of sharing personal experiences; these just didn\'t often lead to one-to-one-relationships. @sohwng called this being interested in ""the personal but not the person""', ""There's a lot more to the paper, and @sohwng or I would love to talk more about it."", ""Finally, @sohwng was an amazing first author and the driver of this project. She is doing lots of other amazing work that you'll be hearing about soon. You should definitely follow her here and on Google Scholar, and you should read and cite our paper! :)""]",21,08,1256