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arxiv: 2505.01219 · v1 · submitted 2025-05-02 · 💻 cs.SI · cs.HC

Tell me who its founders are and I'll tell you what your online community looks like: Online community founders' personality and community attributes

Yaniv Dover , Shaul Oreg This is my paper

Pith reviewed 2026-05-22 17:38 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.SI cs.HC
keywords online communitiespersonality traitsBig FiveRedditcommunity sustainabilityfounder traitssocial network structureengagement
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0 comments X

The pith

The personality traits of online community founders predict their communities' engagement levels, network structure, and long-term sustainability.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

This paper examines how the Big Five personality traits of founders shape the attributes and staying power of the online communities they create. The authors built a method to infer those traits from founders' social media writing and tested the links across thousands of Reddit groups. A sympathetic reader would care because it points to a founder-driven mechanism that could explain why some communities grow active and structured while others do not, beyond the usual focus on activity counts or platform rules. If the links hold, community outcomes become partly traceable to the psychological profile of the person who started the group.

Core claim

We develop a tool to estimate community members' Big Five personality traits from their social media text and use it to estimate the traits of 35,164 founders in 8,625 Reddit communities. We find support for most of our predictions about the relationships between founder traits and community sustainability and attributes, including the level of engagement within the community, aspects of its social network structure, and whether the founders themselves remain active in it.

What carries the argument

A text-based estimator for the Big Five personality traits of community founders, used to link those traits to measured community outcomes.

If this is right

  • Founder personality traits relate to higher or lower levels of member engagement in the community.
  • Founder personality shapes measurable aspects of the community's social network structure.
  • Certain founder traits increase the likelihood that the founders stay active participants over time.
  • Founder personality contributes to overall community sustainability.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • Platform designers could experiment with prompts or tools that help potential founders reflect on how their own traits might steer the group they start.
  • The same trait-estimation approach might reveal parallel patterns in communities on other platforms or in offline groups.
  • Future work could test whether founder personality interacts with community topic or size to amplify or dampen the reported effects.

Load-bearing premise

The tool developed to estimate community members' Big Five personality traits from their social media text provides accurate measurements of the founders' traits.

What would settle it

Direct personality questionnaires completed by the same founders show no reliable correlation with the text-derived trait scores, or communities grouped by similar founder trait profiles show no systematic differences in engagement, network metrics, or founder retention.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2505.01219 by Shaul Oreg, Yaniv Dover.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: Research Model Based on the Big Five trait definitions, there is good reasons to expect links between the traits and online community attributes. First, conscientiousness, which represents individuals’ proneness to being dependable, hardworking and methodical has been linked with performance across numerous contexts, and is the most consistent predictor of performance among the Big Five (Barrick and Mount … view at source ↗
read the original abstract

Online communities are an increasingly important stakeholder for firms, and despite the growing body of research on them, much remains to be learned about them and about the factors that determine their attributes and sustainability. Whereas most of the literature focuses on predictors such as community activity, network structure, and platform interface, there is little research about behavioral and psychological aspects of community members and leaders. In the present study we focus on the personality traits of community founders as predictors of community attributes and sustainability. We develop a tool to estimate community members' Big Five personality traits from their social media text and use it to estimate the traits of 35,164 founders in 8,625 Reddit communities. We find support for most of our predictions about the relationships between founder traits and community sustainability and attributes, including the level of engagement within the community, aspects of its social network structure, and whether the founders themselves remain active in it.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

2 major / 2 minor

Summary. The manuscript develops a custom text-based tool to infer Big Five personality traits from social media posts and applies it to estimate traits for 35,164 founders across 8,625 Reddit communities. It reports empirical support for most pre-specified predictions linking founder personality to community sustainability, engagement levels, aspects of social network structure, and whether founders remain active in the communities they created.

Significance. If the personality measurement tool demonstrates convergent and discriminant validity against established scales, the work would meaningfully extend computational social science by showing how individual psychological differences among founders shape collective community outcomes, moving beyond the dominant focus on activity metrics and network topology alone.

major comments (2)
  1. [Abstract] Abstract: the claim of support for predictions is presented without any statistical details, controls, validation metrics for the personality tool, or effect sizes, so the data-to-claim link cannot be evaluated from the available information.
  2. [Methods (personality estimation)] Section describing the personality estimation tool (likely Methods): the central claim requires that the developed tool produces valid trait scores for 35k+ Reddit founders, yet no external criterion validation (e.g., correlation with self-report NEO-PI or IPIP scales on a held-out sample) is demonstrated; if the estimator primarily captures linguistic style, subreddit topic, or posting frequency rather than the intended Big Five constructs, the reported links to engagement, network structure, and founder retention are uninterpretable.
minor comments (2)
  1. [Introduction] Ensure all hypotheses are stated explicitly with directional predictions before the results section to improve readability and allow direct mapping to findings.
  2. [Results] Add effect sizes, confidence intervals, and robustness checks (e.g., alternative model specifications) to the results tables or figures reporting the trait-community attribute associations.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

2 responses · 1 unresolved

We thank the referee for their constructive comments, which help clarify how to strengthen the presentation of our work. We respond to each major comment below, indicating where we will revise the manuscript and where we provide clarification or note limitations inherent to the data.

read point-by-point responses

  1. Referee: [Abstract] Abstract: the claim of support for predictions is presented without any statistical details, controls, validation metrics for the personality tool, or effect sizes, so the data-to-claim link cannot be evaluated from the available information.

    Authors: We agree that the abstract would be more informative with additional quantitative details. In the revised manuscript we will update the abstract to report the sample sizes (8,625 communities and 35,164 founders), note that analyses include relevant controls for community age, size, and topic, briefly describe the internal validation metrics for the personality tool, and include representative effect sizes or standardized coefficients for the main associations with sustainability, engagement, and network structure. revision: yes

  2. Referee: [Methods (personality estimation)] Section describing the personality estimation tool (likely Methods): the central claim requires that the developed tool produces valid trait scores for 35k+ Reddit founders, yet no external criterion validation (e.g., correlation with self-report NEO-PI or IPIP scales on a held-out sample) is demonstrated; if the estimator primarily captures linguistic style, subreddit topic, or posting frequency rather than the intended Big Five constructs, the reported links to engagement, network structure, and founder retention are uninterpretable.

    Authors: We acknowledge the importance of establishing that the tool measures the intended constructs rather than surface linguistic features. The tool was trained and internally validated on multiple public social-media personality datasets using cross-validation and comparison against other text-based estimators; these details and performance metrics are reported in the Methods section. We will expand this section to include additional robustness checks that control for posting frequency, subreddit topic distributions, and linguistic style markers. However, because the study relies on publicly available Reddit posts without accompanying self-report personality inventories, we cannot compute correlations with NEO-PI or IPIP scores for the 35,164 founders. We will add an explicit limitations paragraph discussing this constraint and the possibility of residual construct-irrelevant variance, while noting that the pre-specified theoretical predictions and the coherent pattern of results across independent outcomes provide indirect support for the tool's utility. revision: partial

standing simulated objections not resolved
  • External criterion validation against self-report scales (NEO-PI or IPIP) on the specific Reddit founder sample, as no such self-report data exist in the observational dataset.

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No circularity: established personality constructs applied to independent community metrics via a separately developed estimator

full rationale

The paper develops a text-based estimator for Big Five traits and applies it to founder text from Reddit communities, then tests pre-specified relationships against separately measured outcomes (engagement levels, network structure, founder retention). No derivation step reduces a claimed prediction to a fitted parameter or definition drawn from the same target data; the trait scores and community attributes are distinct measurements. The abstract and described approach treat the estimator as an input tool rather than deriving its validity from the reported associations. This is the standard non-circular pattern of importing validated constructs into a new domain.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 1 axioms · 0 invented entities

The central claim rests on the validity of inferring personality from text and on the assumption that identified founders drive the observed community attributes.

axioms (1)
  • domain assumption Big Five personality traits can be accurately estimated from social media text using the developed tool
    This mapping is required to obtain founder trait scores from posts.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.0 · 5693 in / 1112 out tokens · 80703 ms · 2026-05-22T17:38:08.768680+00:00 · methodology

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