How Founder Motivations, Goals, and Actions Influence Early Trajectories of Online Communities

Online communities offer their members various benefits, such as information access, social and emotional support, and entertainment. Despite the important role that founders play in shaping communities, prior research has focused primarily on what drives users to participate and contribute; the motivations and goals of founders remain underexplored. To uncover how and why online communities get started, we present findings from a survey of 951 recent founders of Reddit communities. We find that topical interest is the most common motivation for community creation, followed by motivations to exchange information, connect with others, and self-promote. Founders have heterogeneous goals for their nascent communities, but they tend to privilege community quality and engagement over sheer growth. Differences in founders' early attitudes towards their communities help predict not only the community-building actions that they pursue, but also the ability of their communities to attract visitors, contributors, and subscribers over the first 28 days. We end with a discussion of the implications for researchers, designers, and founders of online communities.