Lurking: Less is Moar

When first making contact with an online community, regardless of the subject matter the community covers, it is generally best to read without participating in online discussions, the better to understand the dynamics and unwritten rules of the community as opposed to simply diving in headfirst. In most cases, the worst that will happen to a "n00b" who posts too soon is that they will be subject to public ridicule by other posters; however, more serious infractions, whether the rule is written or not, can result in users being banned or suspended. For these and many other reasons, those who join an online community often feel it is in their best interest to observe without participating, at least initially.

All posters in a community, whether or not the community requires them to register, are by definition anonymous. The setup of most registrations requires a username, password, and valid email address, but none of this information guarantees that the person behind the computer is who they claim to be. As such, most online communities must operate on a certain level of implied trust that all those involved will play by the rules of general decorum, if not the community's specific rules.

Lurkers who have registered at an online community but not posted there do so for a variety of reasons, the most common of these being shyness and the preservation of privacy (Nonnecke, Preece, Andrews & Voutour, 2004). However, although they may not be actively contributing to online discussions, lurkers propagate discussions held on a given site by disseminating the information they learn there to other non-members (Takahashi, Fujimoto & Yamasaki, 2003). Thus, although lurkers may not be obvious information vectors in a given website, they serve an invaluable purpose in terms of spreading around the knowledge they gain from watch the communities.

In the final summation, the anonymity of online communities can encourage users to share information with each other they might not otherwise have felt comfortable divulging. However, it is the phenomenon of lurking that is really responsible for ensuring that valuable information shared on websites is distributed amongst the online community at large.

References


Nonnecke, B., Preece, J., Andrews, D., & Voutour, R. (2004). Online lurkers tell why. Paper presented at the August 2004 Proceedings of the Tenth Americas Conference on Information Systems, New York, NY.


Takahashi, M., Fujimoto, M., & Yamasaki, N. (2003). The active lurker: Influence of an in-house online community on its outside environment. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 2003 International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work, 1-10.