Helpful or harmful? : negative behavior toward newcomers and welfare in online communities

Newcomers are important for the survival of online communities, but they are often unfamiliar with ingroup norms. Thus, their contributions often receive negative reactions and comments from established members. We study a novel intervention aimed at successfully socializing newcomers into online communities: a “newcomer nudge” that informs community members when they are interacting with a member’s first contribution and asks them to be more lenient toward its creator. Taking advantage of granular data from a large deal-sharing community and a natural experiment, we use a difference-in-differences approach and find robust evidence that the newcomer nudge induced members to write 54% more comments with 10% fewer negative words in response to newcomer deals. Our results show that the nudge-induced change in behavior toward newcomers increased newcomer retention. We also observe that before the nudge, newcomers’ subsequent deals received more net votes (upvotes minus downvotes) than their first deal. However, after the nudge, newcomers’ subsequent deals were not more popular than their first deal. We conclude that the nudge caused a temporary shock to newcomers’ first contributions and the absence of the nudge on subsequent contributions is likely to account for the decline in net votes. Our findings suggest that newcomers’ initial success due to the nudge had limited impact on their future performance. We provide managerial implications for the successful socialization of newcomers into online communities