# Community Identity and User Engagement in a Multi-Community Landscape

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.09665 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09665/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

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- [Stranger Danger! Cross-Community Interactions with Fringe Users Increase the Growth of Fringe Communities on Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12186/) (2023)
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- [Research Borderlands: Analysing Writing Across Research Cultures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00784/) (2025)
- [With Flying Colors: Predicting Community Success in Large-scale Collaborative Campaigns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09650/) (2023)
- [This Must Be the Place: Predicting Engagement of Online Communities in a Large-scale Distributed Campaign](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05334/) (2022)
- [Inside the echo chamber: Linguistic underpinnings of misinformation on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15925/) (2024)
- [Reddit After Roe: A Computational Analysis of Abortion Narratives and Barriers in the Wake of Dobbs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22566/) (2026)
- [Characterizing Cultural Localization in AI-Generated Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14626/) (2026)
- [The Garden of Forking Prompts: How Users Explore Narrative Space in Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14677/) (2026)
- [Finding Common Ground: Graded Communal Knowledge in Bluesky Starter Packs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19549/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A community's identity defines and shapes its internal dynamics. Our current understanding of this interplay is mostly limited to glimpses gathered from isolated studies of individual communities. In this work we provide a systematic exploration of the nature of this relation across a wide variety of online communities. To this end we introduce a quantitative, language-based typology reflecting two key aspects of a community's identity: how distinctive, and how temporally dynamic it is. By mapping almost 300 Reddit communities into the landscape induced by this typology, we reveal regularities in how patterns of user engagement vary with the characteristics of a community. Our results suggest that the way new and existing users engage with a community depends strongly and systematically on the nature of the collective identity it fosters, in ways that are highly consequential to community maintainers. For example, communities with distinctive and highly dynamic identities are more likely to retain their users. However, such niche communities also exhibit much larger acculturation gaps between existing users and newcomers, which potentially hinder the integration of the latter. More generally, our methodology reveals differences in how various social phenomena manifest across communities, and shows that structuring the multi-community landscape can lead to a better understanding of the systematic nature of this diversity.