CRII: HCC: The Creation, Maintenance, and Disruption of Inequality in Online Communities

Online communities are rich sources of information and empowerment due to the access they provide to knowledge and learning, skill development, and social support. However, user participation varies greatly among members in online communities; less active members tend to receive fewer benefits and lower status within the community. Although general differences in how people use online resources have been studied through the lens of digital inequality, which has focused on access to reliable Internet services and confidence in technology skills, less is known about what drives inequalities in online communities, or whether those inequalities might lead to the marginalization of particular people or subgroups.

To better-understand these status and participation inequalities, this project will analyze online communities as complex social systems where outcomes are shaped by individual motivations; community norms and governance; the design of platforms' interfaces, information flows, and algorithms; and the structure of social networks. The goal of the project is a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that lead to risks of inequality, as well as design ideas for how community organizers and platform designers can create more opportunity for equitable interactions online.

To examine the emergence of inequality, this project will develop a novel conceptual framework, the online inequality loop (OIL), to explain the emergence and persistence of inequality in online communities. The phases of inequality in the OIL framework demonstrate how inequality is created, maintained, and disrupted through socio-technical interactions between users and platforms, which co-construct intellectual communities that reward particular kinds of contributions.

In this process, community members become differentiated based on the quality, quantity, and attention to their contributions made to the community. This differentiation is often designed to recognize desirable participation, but can also exclude or marginalize content and content creators that focus on topics, interests, and preferences that are not as popular or prevalent as others in the community.

To better-understand how these inequalities develop, the project team will analyze posting and recognition behavior from three large online communities that focus on knowledge production, software development, and data science. These analyses will focus on three main phases of community lifecycles called out in the OIL theory, including creation, maintenance, and disruption of participation inequality.

Through the analysis, the work will provide a generalized account of inequality in online communities, classify multiple dimensions of online inequality, and identify kinds of historical events that can shift community values, increase user activity, generate new knowledge, and potentially provide opportunities to mitigate inequalities.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.