No Community Can Do Everything: Why People Participate in Similar Online Communities
Nathan TeBlunthuis, Charles Kiene, Isabella Brown, Laura Alia Levi, Nicole McGinnis, Benjamin Mako Hill
TL;DR
The paper investigates why users participate in multiple online communities that cover similar topics. It combines an interview-based qualitative study of 20 Reddit participants from nine clusters with a grounded-theory analysis to identify three core benefits: access to specific content, homophilous social belonging, and broad audience attention. These benefits are in tension, producing a three-way trade-off (a trilemma) that makes a single community insufficient; instead, portfolios of overlapping communities collectively provide the full set of benefits. The work contributes an ecological framing for online communities, demonstrates mutualism over competition in user perceptions, and offers design implications for multi-community platforms to support portfolio-style participation and cross-community coordination. The findings advance understanding of how users actively construct and navigate overlapping spaces to optimize information, social connection, and reach in digital ecosystems.
Abstract
Large-scale quantitative analyses have shown that individuals frequently talk to each other about similar things in different online spaces. Why do these overlapping communities exist? We provide an answer grounded in the analysis of 20 interviews with active participants in clusters of highly related subreddits. Within a broad topical area, there are a diversity of benefits an online community can confer. These include (a) specific information and discussion, (b) socialization with similar others, and (c) attention from the largest possible audience. A single community cannot meet all three needs. Our findings suggest that topical areas within an online community platform tend to become populated by groups of specialized communities with diverse sizes, topical boundaries, and rules. Compared with any single community, such systems of overlapping communities are able to provide a greater range of benefits.