Chat More and Contribute Better: An Empirical Study of a Knowledge-Sharing Community

We analyze whether and under what conditions adding a new, informal space for interaction can improve knowledge exchange in an online community. We explore this question by analyzing the effects of introducing chat rooms in the Stack Overflow question-and-answer (Q&A) forum. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that the introduction of a chat room increases user contributions in related programming tags in the Q&A forum but only among community users who are active in the chat rooms. Improvements to question outcomes are concentrated among a closed subgroup of users who have been active in the chat room. We next study how these patterns change with the introduction of a bridging mechanism: a feed that pushes all questions from the Q&A forum to the chat room. Combining a chat room with a feed leads to faster answers that benefit a wider group of users than chat rooms alone. These findings have important implications for the design of new spaces in which users can interact in existing online communities.

History: Sam Ransbotham, Senior Editor; De Liu, Associate Editor.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2021.0185.