Seering, Joseph, et al. "Proximate social factors in first-time contribution to online communities." Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2020.

This study investigates the factors influencing the decision of users to transition from lurking to participating in online communities, focusing on Twitch chatrooms. By analyzing 183 million messages, the research identifies key differences between first-time participants and regular users, revealing that the diversity of user types in a community and its size significantly affect the likelihood of new user participation. Additionally, the study finds a negative association between information-seeking behaviors in first-time participants and their short- to medium-term retention in the community. These insights offer valuable implications for the recruitment, management, and retention strategies of online community managers and social computing researchers.