Online communities face high turnover, particularly among newcomers. Thanks to HKUST’s Kai-Lung Hui and colleagues, these and other communities can benefit from an innovative strategy for improving newcomers’ retention and performance.

The fresh knowledge supplied by new members can be “of great marginal benefit to online communities,” note the authors. To help them contribute meaningfully, however, existing members must provide guidance and acceptance—a process known as newcomer socialization.

“An important outstanding question is how online communities can shape the behavior of existing members to facilitate newcomer socialization,” say Hui and co-authors. After all, policies advocating kindness to newcomers are not always respected.

The researchers propose an alternative solution. “We advance a novel strategy to improve behaviors toward newcomers, i.e., anticipatory excuses, where a contributor’s newcomer status is announced to other members before they engage with their post.” The idea is to encourage insiders to attribute newcomers’ poor performance to inexperience rather than inability.

To empirically test whether such anticipatory excuses promote newcomer socialization, the researchers exploited a natural experiment on a large deal-sharing platform. “An intervention that proactively reminded people to be more considerate of newcomers caused newcomer deals to receive more comments with a more positive sentiment,” they report. Newcomers were also more likely to post another deal after this “newcomer nudge.”

“Feeling socially accepted by insiders can make newcomers more likely to return, regardless of their intrinsic propensity to participate,” the authors conclude. Although such positive reinforcement may not affect the quality of newcomers’ contributions, it can help communities avoid toxic behavior and retain members.

These findings have implications beyond the social media setting, as newcomers are often intimidated by existing members, making it hard for them to fit into the new environment. New drivers may be discouraged if they encounter hostile road users, for example, and players new to a sport can be demoralized when facing unfriendly teammates or opponents. Supportive engagement at the outset can give them more confidence and encourage them to continue participating.