More than Contributors and Lurkers

....new study

[tangor]

Throw out your old definition of online communities as comprised only of lurkers and contributors commentards. A team of academics has come up with seven categories of people who hang out online, and the same number of post types.

The new classification reached the light of day in the February 2012 issue of International Journal of Managing Information Technology, in which Xuequn Wang and Yanjun Yu collaborated on a paper titled Classify participants in online communities (PDF).

[theregister.co.uk...]

[rocknbil]

I guess there really is nothing new under the sun. This was covered years ago, a lot more colorfully (pun intended,) with Flame Warriors. :-)

[lucy24]

Er, where's

Type 7: Response posts which foster topic drift
Type 8: Response posts which fatally derail the original topic
Type 9: "Me too!" posts

et cetera? They don't count all those as variants of Type 4 ("Feedback") do they?

[Automan Empire]

Real cutting edge stuff here. Flame warriors came to mind before even clicking the thread.

Somebody ought to Rickroll this reporter, and REALLY blow his mind!