Leveraging community support and platform affordances on a path to more active participation

The success of online communities is driven by continuous active community participation, but motivating silent members (lurkers) to participate might push them faster than they are prepared for and demand extra labor from active members. This article explores user participation in online fan fiction communities through empirical interviews of once-silent but now-active members, demonstrating how such platforms afford lurking as a legitimate mode of participation and provide affordances for users to participate at their own pace. We propose a theory of incidental mentorship, where active users become role models within a supportive community and motivate lurkers to participate without doing additional work

Affordance · Art · Computer network · Fandom · Human–computer interaction · Media studies · Multimedia · Online community · Sociology · Visual arts · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Digital Games and Media · Impact of Technology on Adolescents · Social Media and Politics