An interesting study: Predicting Continued Participation in Newsgroups

Elisabeth Joyce and Robert E. Kraut hypothesized that “Receiving a response to an initial post will increase the likelihood that the poster will post again”. Conducting content analysis, they coded 2,777 messages from six different newsgroups. The result supported their hypothesis.

For more information about their study, you can get the article from
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue3/joyce.html