Preferential behavior in online groups

It is shown that users who will go on to become long-lived, highly-engaged users experience significantly better treatment than other users from the moment they join the group, well before there is an opportunity for them to develop a long-standing relationship with members of the group.

Abstract

Online communities in the form of message boards, listservs, and newsgroups continue to represent a considerable amount of the social activity on the Internet. Every year thousands of groups ourish while others decline into relative obscurity; likewise, millions of members join a new community every year, some of whom will come to manage or moderate the conversation while others simply sit by the sidelines and observe. These processes of group formation, growth, and dissolution are central in social science, and in an online venue they have ramifications for the design and development of community software