Motivations and Constraints to Member Engagement in Flickr Groups

Understanding what drives members of online content-sharing communities to contribute is key to understanding why some communities flourish while others fizzle out. Both cognitive and social explanations have been proposed with varying degrees of support from data collected from existing online communities. However, because most studies to date have tended to focus only on a whole community, it is not always clear how important that community is to its members relative to the other online communities in which they are engaged. We study the associations between member-group interactions relative members' other Flickr activity and their contributions group content (photos and comments). We introduce two sets of group quality measures. The measures in the first set indicate the level of relative engagement members have with the group while those in the second indicate the extent of interest in the group's content (photos). We find support for two theories of member-group interaction. Firstly, consistent with the idea that each member has an absolute limit to their capacity to contribute or engage, we found that members who were members of fewer other groups tended to contribute more. Secondly, we found support for the hypothesis that individuals are more likely to contribute when they believe that their contributions will be identifiable. These findings provide the basis for studying the differences between groups that arise due to different member compositions.