How founder motivations, goals, and actions influence early trajectories of online communities

TL;DR

The paper investigates how founder motivations, goals, and early actions influence the initial growth of online communities. Using a survey of 951 recent Reddit subreddits' founders, it identifies four motivational dimensions, with topical interest as the most prevalent, and shows that founders generally emphasize quality over growth. Regression analyses link these motivations and planned actions to 28-day trajectories in visitors, contributors, and subscribers, revealing distinct patterns such as topical focus driving faster early growth and awareness-building plans yielding broad advantages. The findings offer design and methodological guidance for tailoring onboarding, supporting topic-specific initiatives, and providing founders with actionable analytics to improve early community viability across platforms.

Abstract

Online communities offer their members various benefits, such as information access, social and emotional support, and entertainment. Despite the important role that founders play in shaping communities, prior research has focused primarily on what drives users to participate and contribute; the motivations and goals of founders remain underexplored. To uncover how and why online communities get started, we present findings from a survey of 951 recent founders of Reddit communities. We find that topical interest is the most common motivation for community creation, followed by motivations to exchange information, connect with others, and self-promote. Founders have heterogeneous goals for their nascent communities, but they tend to privilege community quality and engagement over sheer growth. These differences in founders' early attitudes towards their communities help predict not only the community-building actions that they pursue, but also the ability of their communities to attract visitors, contributors, and subscribers over the first 28 days. We end with a discussion of the implications for researchers, designers, and founders of online communities.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: Distribution among survey respondents of scores computed for each of the four motivations, on a scale from -2 (Strongly Disagree) to +2 (Strongly Agree). Lines show the mean for each motivation. Community creators were most likely to agree with topic engagement motivations ($\mu = 0.91$, $\sigma = 1.07$), followed by a motivation to exchange information ($\mu = 0.43$, $\sigma = 1.12$) or connect with others ($\mu = 0.37$, $\sigma = 1.06$). Self-promotion motivations were the least commonly reported ($\mu = -0.24$, $\sigma = 1.16$).
• Figure 2: The ranking given to each of the measures of success provided. There is a large amount of heterogeneity in rankings, and each measure receives many high and low rankings.