papers. Wybo Wiersma .net

Attaining critical mass is notoriously difficult for online platforms, and many online communities fail because of this. A common feature of most successful communities, are threads, which are found on forums, Facebook, and on Quora, among other places.

In this paper Agent-Based Simulation was used to examine the impact of variations in thread-structures on growth and critical mass attainment.

What was found was that threads perform better than no threads at all, and indented thread-structures that allow users more control over what to read, improve engagement even further.

Social software needs an active user community before it becomes attractive to new visitors.

This paper analyzes and describes an attempt at attaining such critical mass for LogiLogi.org, an innovative philosophical discussion platform (described in this paper).

The paper examines the limited literature on critical mass, and reports on two usability studies that were done on LogiLogi. LogiLogi was then improved in ways that would maximize its chances of attaining critical mass (which did not succeed).

The literature review, as well as some of our conclusions may be useful to other web-applications.