Online community and communication patterns

About video sharing sites

Abstract

This study focuses on the user community with the perspective of web platform. Although, much more research is done in this field, the context and purpose is not unified. We reviewed recent literature about peer production and net platform, and provide an unified viewpoint. Meanwhile, we found little research has been discussed the relationship between platform and type of user community, even though, it is a quite crucial issue. In this paper, we use the Design Structure Matrix (DSM) to achieve the comparison analysis on different web platforms with the cases of video sharing sites (Youtube and niconico). As a result, we found that the user communities take different forms between two different platforms. Also, communication patterns and the performance of the user communities with the characteristic of productive activity, are influence from interface design among the users. For empirical contribution, according to control design interface among the users, enterprises can manage peer group gathering on the web platform.