Whenever one person cannot be excluded from the benefits that others provide, each person is motivated not to contribute to the joint effort, but to free-ride on the efforts of others. If all participants choose to free-ride, the collective benefit will not be produced. The temptation to free-ride, however, may dominate the decision process and thus all will end up where no one wanted to be.

Overusing bandwidth is not the only social dilemma members of the Usenet face. Whatever the goal of the newsgroup, it's success depends on the active and ongoing contributions of those who choose to participate in it. If the goal of the newsgroup is to exchange information and answer questions about a particular topic (e.g., alt.comp.sys.gateway-2000), participants must be willing to answer questions raised by others, summarize and post replies to queries they have made themselves, and pass along information that is relevant to the group. If the goal of the newsgroup is to discuss a current event or social issue (e.g., soc.veterans), participants need to contribute to the discussion and to encourage its development. Once again there is the temptation to free-ride: asking question but not answering them; gathering information but not distributing it; or reading ongoing discussions without contributing to them (termed lurking). Some newsgroups successfully meet these challenges, others start well and then degrade, and still other newsgroups fail at the beginning of their existence, never managing to attract a critical mass of participants.

Established sites like the Well have long provided moderated areas where people can identify themselves, be welcomed, and ask questions about the site, and the different topics and discussion areas. There is no debate or arguments on welcome sites, simply the chance for people to say who they are, why they're here, and what they are interested in, and for the site - usually volunteers -- to help guide them.

One of the best things about the Web, as many Lurkers point out, is, in fact, one of the worst - a tolerance for open discussion that makes the Internet the freest culture in the world. For me, this is a fair trade-off.

Liking

Scarcity

The main hypothesis states that a user's cultural capital affects her level of activity in a community and her decision to de-lurk and cease to exist in very active communities because of information overload.

The hypotheses verified here make it clear that fostering receptive participation may be as important and constructive as encouraging active contributions in online communities.

Lurking has been studied in the past [37, 42, 43, 44, 45, 62].

Identifying lurkers constitutes a difficult methodological problem: Lurkers do not leave visible traces. Even if lurkers can be identified, it is difficult to approach them directly, because their identity is often disguised. This is why lurking research is interesting and challenging.

The main goal of this research is to study the triggers to active participation

We built a framework for analyzing passive and active Internet behavior based on Social Capital Theory [47] and Cultural Capital Theory [8].

The Social Capital aspect of our research has been described elsewhere [51].

This paper concentrates on the Cultural Capital and its relation to the lurking phenomenon.

A somewhat deeper semantic examination reveals that the English verb "to lurk" usually means "lying in wait", often with malicious intent.

Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of the verb "lurk" offers an additional unexpected meaning - "to persist in staying" [38]

To summarize, lurking is an integral and normal part of Internet behavior. It may be perceived as negative and harmful or as positive and useful. However, lurkers are present en masse. Some report the level of lurking to be 50-60% [42, 62], while others estimate it at 90% [29, 37]. This fact alone is strong enough to make research on lurkers worthwhile. Accordingly, many researchers have noted that lurkers are a major part of the Web community and should be studied [29, 31, 52, 53, 63, 78].

Nonnecke [42], Nonnecke and Preece [43] and Preece et al. [45] interviewed several users and classified different reasons for lurking behavior. Only the most relevant and interesting to this study will be pointed out (selected in bold in the table), not necessarily in order of importance.

One often stated reason for lurking is to learn about the community

Kraut et al. [31] point out that silent observation is an important way for novices to learn about a new topic

Whittaker et al. [78] define lurking-as-surveillance as peripheral participation that continues until a topic of direct interest is spotted. Donath [14] proposes that people often try to find out about other participants from the content of their postings. Nonnecke and Preece [43] define learning about the community culture as a central lurker activity - 70% of the users they interviewed stated they lurked to get to know the group better.

Another reason for lurking that is of special interest to this project is a sense of belonging to a group.

This means that in the course of the ostensibly passive activities of watching other people talk and getting familiar with the content and style of the community people feel that they belong to the community. The sense of belonging to an online community has also been reported by Beaudouin and Velkovska [5].

Another frequent explanation of lurking is free-riding.

Free-riding is defined as a use of common good without contributing to it [11, 65]. As information is frequently considered a public good [50], lurkers can be perceived as free riders. Kollock and Smith [30], Wellman and Gulia [76] and Morris and Ogan [41] discuss lurkers as free riders, referring to non active participation

Nevertheless, free riding connotes negative activity.

Another reason for lurking is information overload [25, 26].

This observation is related to the cognitive abilities of people to digest huge amounts of information.

but they do have to deal with all the messages flying around. So it is not surprising that people find it hard to keep up with very busy communities and prefer lurking there and sometimes even dropping off entirely [42].

He concludes that the main reason for lurking is a violent atmosphere in computer forums, dominated by young and not so well-behaved people.

Finally, the last reason of interest is the reaction of the community to de-lurking. In his SlashDot.com article, Katz [29]

Nonnecke [42] also points out that the reaction of the community to de-lurking and flaming (violent Internet behavior, see [23]) are possible reasons for lurking.

Soroka et al. [62] found a clear correlation between a positive first posting experience and subsequent active participation in the community.

If the general atmosphere in the community is bad, the reaction to newcomers is non-welcoming or an attitude to user's subjects of interest is negative, people might choose to stay silent or drop off.