No Community Can Do Everything: Why People Participate in Similar Online Communities
Large-scale quantitative analyses have shown that individuals frequently talk to each other about similar thingsin different online spaces. Why do these overlapping communities exist? We provide an answer grounded inthe analysis of 20 interviews with active participants in clusters of highly related subreddits: Within a broadtopical area, there are a diversity of benefits that an online community can confer. These include: (a) specificinformation and discussions, (b) socialization with similar others, and (c) attention from the largest possibleaudience. A single community cannot meet every need. Our findings suggest that growing areas of interest onan platform for online communities tend to become populated by groups of specialized communities withdiverse membership sizes, topical boundaries, and rules. Such systems of overlapping communities are able toprovide a greater range of benefits than any single community.
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