Early activity diversity: Assessing newcomer retention from first-session activity

Raghav Pavan Karumur; Tien T. Nguyen; Joseph A. Konstan

doi:10.1145/2818048.2820009

Early activity diversity: Assessing newcomer retention from first-session activity

Raghav Pavan Karumur, Tien T. Nguyen, Joseph A. Konstan

Computer Science and Engineering

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

15 Scopus citations

Abstract

Online communities suffer serious newcomer attrition. This paper explores whether and how early activity diversity - The degree to which a newcomer engages in a wide range of a site's activities in the first session - is associated with their longevity. We introduce a metric (DSCORE) to characterize early activity diversity in online sites and run our analyses on an online community 'MovieLens'. We find that DSCORE is significant both by itself and in conjunction with a measure of quantity of activity in predicting longevity. This finding is robust to different measures of longevity (aggregate number of sessions and attritions after sessions 1, 5, and 10). The immediate implication is an effective classifier for identifying users with higher (or lower) expected longevity from the first-session activity. We also find DSCORE is more useful than a traditional measure of measuring diversity such as the Gini-Simpson index. We conclude by discussing how early activity diversity may be more broadly effective in supporting design and management of online communities.

Original language	English (US)
Title of host publication	Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2016
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery
Pages	595-608
Number of pages	14
ISBN (Electronic)	9781450335928
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2820009
State	Published - Feb 27 2016
Event	19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2016 - San Francisco, United States Duration: Feb 27 2016 → Mar 2 2016

Publication series

Name	Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW
Volume	27

Other

Other	19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2016
Country/Territory	United States
City	San Francisco
Period	2/27/16 → 3/2/16

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Acknowledgments This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under grants IIS 0808692, 1017697, 1319382, and Fellowship support from the University of Minnesota Informatics Institute. We also acknowledge the thoughtful discussions and helpful feedback from several members of the Grouplens Research lab along with their assistance in development of the classification tree. We thank the consultants at the Statistical Consulting Center and the Biostatistics Consulting Unit at the University of Minnesota for reviewing our statistical analyses. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 ACM.

Keywords

Activity
Activity diversity
Dealing with newcomers
Early user experience
First session
Longevity
Newcomer engagement
Newcomer retention
Online communities

Publisher link

10.1145/2818048.2820009

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Cite this

Karumur, R. P., Nguyen, T. T., & Konstan, J. A. (2016). Early activity diversity: Assessing newcomer retention from first-session activity. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2016 (pp. 595-608). (Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW; Vol. 27). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2820009

Early activity diversity : Assessing newcomer retention from first-session activity. / Karumur, Raghav Pavan; Nguyen, Tien T.; Konstan, Joseph A.

Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2016. Association for Computing Machinery, 2016. p. 595-608 (Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW; Vol. 27).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Karumur, RP, Nguyen, TT & Konstan, JA 2016, Early activity diversity: Assessing newcomer retention from first-session activity. in Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2016. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW, vol. 27, Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 595-608, 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2016, San Francisco, United States, 2/27/16. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2820009

Karumur RP, Nguyen TT, Konstan JA. Early activity diversity: Assessing newcomer retention from first-session activity. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2016. Association for Computing Machinery. 2016. p. 595-608. (Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW). doi: 10.1145/2818048.2820009

Karumur, Raghav Pavan ; Nguyen, Tien T. ; Konstan, Joseph A. / Early activity diversity : Assessing newcomer retention from first-session activity. Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2016. Association for Computing Machinery, 2016. pp. 595-608 (Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW).

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Early activity diversity: Assessing newcomer retention from first-session activity

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