# With Flying Colors: Predicting Community Success in Large-scale Collaborative Campaigns

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09650 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09650/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 96 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Predicting Dynamic Embedding Trajectory in Temporal Interaction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01207/) (2019)
- [InfoGraph: Unsupervised and Semi-supervised Graph-Level Representation Learning via Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01000/) (2019)
- [Cooperative Game Theory Approaches for Network Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.03587/) (2017)
- [DIG: A Turnkey Library for Diving into Graph Deep Learning Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12608/) (2021)
- [Community Interaction and Conflict on the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03697/) (2018)
- [Community Identity and User Engagement in a Multi-Community Landscape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09665/) (2017)
- [Loyalty in Online Communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03386/) (2017)
- [The anatomy of Reddit: An overview of academic research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.10881/) (2018)
- [From Reddit to Wall Street: The role of committed minorities in financial collective action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07361/) (2021)
- [Extracting Inter-community Conflicts in Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04405/) (2018)
- [Roots of Trumpism: Homophily and Social Feedback in Donald Trump Support on Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01790/) (2020)
- [Latent Structure in Collaboration: the Case of Reddit r/place](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05962/) (2018)
- [Are All Successful Communities Alike? Characterizing and Predicting the Success of Online Communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07724/) (2019)
- [How Community Feedback Shapes User Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.1429/) (2014)
- [The Effect of Social Feedback in a Reddit Weight Loss Community](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07936/) (2016)
- [Self-induced consensus of Reddit users to characterise the GameStop short squeeze](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07059/) (2021)
- [Tracing Community Genealogy: How New Communities Emerge from the Old](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01990/) (2018)
- [This Must Be the Place: Predicting Engagement of Online Communities in a Large-scale Distributed Campaign](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05334/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [A Test of Time: Predicting the Sustainable Success of Online Collaboration in Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19150/) (2024)
- [Interpretable Early Warnings using Machine Learning in an Online Game-experiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09880/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Online communities develop unique characteristics, establish social norms, and exhibit distinct dynamics among their members. Activity in online communities often results in concrete ``off-line'' actions with a broad societal impact (e.g., political street protests and norms related to sexual misconduct). While community dynamics, information diffusion, and online collaborations have been widely studied in the past two decades, quantitative studies that measure the effectiveness of online communities in promoting their agenda are scarce. In this work, we study the correspondence between the effectiveness of a community, measured by its success level in a competitive online campaign, and the underlying dynamics between its members. To this end, we define a novel task: predicting the success level of online communities in Reddit's r/place - a large-scale distributed experiment that required collaboration between community members. We consider an array of definitions for success level; each is geared toward different aspects of collaborative achievement. We experiment with several hybrid models, combining various types of features. Our models significantly outperform all baseline models over all definitions of `success level'. Analysis of the results and the factors that contribute to the success of coordinated campaigns can provide a better understanding of the resilience or the vulnerability of communities to online social threats such as election interference or anti-science trends. We make all data used for this study publicly available for further research.