A Simulation for Designing Online Community: Member Motivation, Contribution, and Discussion Moderation

This article describes and validates an agent-based model that integrates social psychological theories on collective effort, group identity, and interpersonal bonds to understand trade-offs in designing online communities. The model is then used to examine when different types of moderation in online communities will be valuable: no moderation in which all members are exposed to all messages, community-level moderation in which off-topic messages are deleted for everyone in the group, and personalized moderation in which people see different messages based on their interests. Compared to a no-moderation control, personalized moderation is effective in increasing members’ contribution and commitment, especially in topically broad communities and those with high message volume. In contrast, community-level moderation increases member commitment but not contribution. By removing off-topic messages, community-level moderation increases members’ information benefits at the expense of their opportunities for developing online relationships. This research demonstrates the value of computational modeling to synthesize narrow theories to describe behaviors in a complex system and to inform online community design.