Virtual Mobilization and Conflicts: The Role of Structural Influences and Conflicts in Shaping Online Community Collaboration and Engagement Open Access
Chen, Shizhen (Spring 2026)
Abstract
Online communities can now coordinate collective action at scale, yet most projects fail to sustain the broad, voluntary participation on which their success depends. This dissertation examines three design levers through which community organizers shape that outcome: organizational structure, goal design, and managerial response to inter-community conflict. Using Reddit's 2022 r/place event, a four-day collaborative canvas on which more than a thousand communities built shared artwork, the three chapters combine large-scale observational data with a structural agent-based simulation.
Chapter 2 examines how inter-community competition moderates the effectiveness of influence structures. Leveraging five months of pre-event activity to baseline each community's hierarchy, we show that competition amplifies rather than erodes structural advantages. During non-modular planning, competition accentuates the coordination advantage of hierarchical communities; during modular execution, it strengthens the mobilization advantage of flat communities, which operate on the extensive margin by drawing in latent members through less assertive communication.
Chapter 3 turns to goal design. Using individual-level trace data, we document that the contributor engagement to goal proximity relationship is an inverted-U rather than the monotonic acceleration predicted by the classical goal-gradient hypothesis. Goal stretch decomposes into two opposing forces: complexity sustains engagement while scale relative to community capacity penalizes it, and the two interact negatively. Overstretched projects take 3.44 times as long as moderate-stretch projects to reach the peak-engagement milestone, though communities with deeper activatable pools are partially buffered.
Chapter 4 extends the framework to contested settings via a structural agent-based simulation. The (community size, goal scale, goal complexity) space partitions into robust, boundary, and pre-failed regimes, with key managerial insights concentrated in the boundary regime. Within it, moderate and early conflict can rally a community, but riding that rally into a stretched declared goal is fragile. Milestone decomposition instead extends the achievable-stretch frontier to roughly 1.3 times the peace-boundary (the maximum project size achievable uninterruptedly) by building endogenous rather than exogenous engagement.
Together, the chapters develop a regime-aware framework in which structural, goal, and conflict-management advantages are contingent on competitive environment, community capacity, and project state.
Table of Contents
table of contents
1 Chapter 1: Introduction. 1
2 Chapter 2: Influence Structures in Digital Coordination and Participation. 7
2.1 Introduction. 7
2.2 Organizing Collective Action in Online Communities. 10
2.2.1 The Role of Influence Structures in Coordinating Decisions 10
2.2.2 The Role of Influence Structures in Mobilizing Participation 13
2.3 Data and Analysis. 14
2.3.1 Collective Action Projects in r/place. 14
2.3.2 Measures and Variables. 16
2.3.3 Analysis of Coordination Speed Using Pre-Start Panel Data 19
2.3.4 Analysis of Participation Mobilization Using Post-Start Panel Data. 21
2.3.5 Mechanism Check: How a Flat Structure Mobilizes Participation 24
2.3.6 Robustness. 28
2.4 Discussion and Conclusion. 32
2.4.1 Practical Implications. 34
2.4.2 Limitations and Future Research. 35
3 Chapter 3: Sustaining the Crowd: How Goal Complexity and Goal Scale Shape Engagement in Online Collective Action. 37
3.1 Introduction. 37
3.2 Theory and Hypotheses. 44
3.2.1 The Goal Gradient in Collective Action. 44
3.2.2 Goal Stretch as a Two-Force Composite. 49
3.2.3 Boundary Condition: Community Activatable Pool 57
3.3 Empirical Context and Data. 58
3.3.1 The r/place 2022 Event 58
3.3.2 Sample Construction. 59
3.3.3 Key Variables. 60
3.4 Main Empirical Analysis. 62
3.4.1 H1: Goal-Gradient Inverted-U.. 63
3.4.2 H2: Two-Force Stretch-Goal Trade-Off 65
3.4.3 Supplementary: Quintile Illustration. 67
3.4.4 Prediction 1 (H3): Overstretch and Milestone Delay. 70
3.5 Additional Analysis: Community Moderation (prediction 2, H4) 72
3.6 Discussion and Conclusion. 75
3.6.1 Theoretical Contributions. 75
3.6.2 Practical Implications. 78
3.6.3 Limitations and Future Directions. 80
4 Chapter 4: Managerial Levers and Their Limits in Contested Online Collective Action. 83
4.1 Introduction. 83
4.2 Model Setup. 86
4.3 The Focal Boundary Archetype. 93
4.4 Intervention 1: Inter-community Conflict Can be Harnessed as Rescue within a Narrow Window.. 94
4.5 Interventions 2 and 3: Goal Stretch under Exogenous vs Endogenous Rise. 96
4.6 Discussion and Conclusion. 100
4.6.1 Theoretical Positioning. 100
4.6.2 Managerial Implications. 101
4.6.3 Future Directions. 102
4.6.4 Conclusion. 103
5 Concluding Remarks. 104
6 References. 110
7 Appendix. 124
Appendix A Identifying Posts with Influencing Intent 124
Appendix B Summary Statistics. 126
Appendix C Robustness Analyses. 128
Appendix D Description of Robustness Tests. 129
Appendix E Mean-field Derivation of Effective Progress Rate 132
Appendix F Simulation Setup. 134
List of Figures
Figure 1.Snapshot of the 2022 r/place canvas hours after the event began 15
Figure 2.Summary of results. 24
Figure 3. Goal-gradient inverted-U. 64
Figure 4. Goal Complexity quintile coefficients on Engagement Half-Life across fixed-effect specifications (N = 1036). Q3 = reference. 68
Figure 5. Goal Scale quintile coefficients on Engagement Half-Life across FE specifications (N = 1036). Q3 = reference. 69
Figure 6. Time to Engagement Peak by Stretch Quintile. 71
Figure 7. Kaplan-Meier curves for time to engagement peak by subscriber-base tercile (N = 865). Large-subscriber communities reach the milestone faster. 75
Figure 8. Stationary-point analysis predicts three regimes. 93
Figure 9. Focal boundary archetype: dynamics under peace. 94
Figure 10. Attack response has two intensity thresholds and an early-timing constraint 96
Figure 11. Interventions 2 and 3: riding an exogenous rally fails; milestone decomposition of endogenous capacity extends the frontier 99
List of Tables
Table 1.Effects of influence structure on project start time (Cox proportional hazards models) 21
Table 2.Effects of influence structure on contributions (OLS models predicting contributions) 23
Table 3. Summary Statistics. 62
Table 4. Goal-gradient inverted-U.. 65
Table 5. The Impact of Goal Complexity and Goal Scale on Participation. 67
Table 6. Quintile Regression for Goal Complexity and Goal Scale. 70
Table 7. Survival Analysis for Time to Engagement Peak. 72
Table 8. The Interaction between Subscriber Count and Goal Scale on Participation. 74
Table 9: Three managerial levers and their operational signatures. 100
Table A1.Summary statistics. 127
Table A2.Accounting for measurement issues. 128
Table A3.Accounting for setting-specific complications. 129
Table A4.Identification via more precise within-panel or within-time variations, and instrumental variable models. 131
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