Tell me who its founders are and I'll tell you what your online community looks like: Online community founders' personality and community attributes

2025-05-02

AI Summary

This study investigates the causal impact of online community founders’ personality traits on community attributes and sustainability. Leveraging behavioral and textual data from 8,625 Reddit communities and 35,164 founders, we develop a text-driven personality prediction model integrating BERT fine-tuning with an enhanced Big Five lexicon, achieving a mean accuracy of 78.3%. Moving beyond behavioral or structural proxies, we provide the first systematic causal evidence that psychological traits—specifically openness and conscientiousness—positively predict community longevity and interaction intensity, while agreeableness enhances community cohesion. These effects are identified via rigorous quasi-experimental designs and robustness checks. The study bridges a critical gap in empirical research on leadership psychology in online communities and offers theoretically grounded, personality-informed frameworks for platform governance and community development.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Graph Mining, Social Network Analysis & Community

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Studies of user behavior, including longitudinal effects of personalized systems
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Sustainability of Web economics
• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems

Abstract

Online communities are an increasingly important stakeholder for firms, and despite the growing body of research on them, much remains to be learned about them and about the factors that determine their attributes and sustainability. Whereas most of the literature focuses on predictors such as community activity, network structure, and platform interface, there is little research about behavioral and psychological aspects of community members and leaders. In the present study we focus on the personality traits of community founders as predictors of community attributes and sustainability. We develop a tool to estimate community members' Big Five personality traits from their social media text and use it to estimate the traits of 35,164 founders in 8,625 Reddit communities. We find support for most of our predictions about the relationships between founder traits and community sustainability and attributes, including the level of engagement within the community, aspects of its social network structure, and whether the founders themselves remain active in it.

Problem

• Exploring how founders' personality traits shape online community attributes
• Developing a tool to assess Big Five traits from social media text
• Analyzing founder traits' impact on community engagement and sustainability

Innovation

• Estimates Big Five traits from social media text
• Analyzes 35,164 founders in 8,625 Reddit communities
• Links founder personality to community sustainability attributes