1. Introduction
[1.1] From posting detailed YouTube videos of favorite baking recipes to finding rapid answers to hyperspecific programming questions on Stack Overflow, membership in online communities is integral to our internet lives. The success of most online communities, especially content-based online communities, is attributed to regular active participation of community members (Bishop 2007; Wenger 1999). However, a majority of users in most online content-based communities are silent consumers of content, also known as lurkers (Nonnecke et al. 2004). While lurking is generally acknowledged as a form of legitimate peripheral participation (Lave and Wenger [1991] 2001), moderators and researchers of online communities alike are continually interested in finding ways to motivate lurkers to participate more actively.
[1.2] However, there are a few problems with this practice. Encouraging lurkers to participate actively might instead drive them away from the community if individual users are not prepared for such participation or are pushed faster than they are comfortable with (Svensson 2018). The work of encouraging lurkers often falls upon active participants who might not have signed up for such leadership work, and instead come to feel burned out (Dosono and Semaan 2019).
[1.3] There is a need to study pathways through which lurkers can become more active in such communities of practice, based on silent interactions that do not demand additional labor of existing members, through a process we label incidental mentorship. This is where online fan fiction communities, on platforms like Fanfiction.net and Archive of Our Own (AO3), come in. From personal experience of being part of these platforms for over twenty years cumulatively, we know that members of such communities have varying degrees of participation—from writing and posting multiple chapters a week to going several months without even logging on and everything in between, as well as regularly reading existing stories without leaving any publicly visible signs. These communities contain active members who post stories and comments daily and participate in organically forming distributed mentorship networks (Campbell et al. 2016; Evans et al. 2017). With a strong legacy of intracommunity mentorship and community structures that afford users existing within and moving across different participatory roles (Davis et al. 2020; Ghosh, Froelich, and Aragon 2023), online fan fiction communities are excellent sites for studying patterns of lurking and promoting lurkers to participate more actively when they are prepared to, without asking extra labor from active users.
[1.4] In this article, we study lurking behaviors in online fan fiction communities through empirical studies of current and former/occasional lurkers and the routes through which some lurkers become more active in creating content within the community. In the formation of routes, we observe the development of incidental mentorship networks amid a positive community environment without active members having to do additional mentorship work. We conclude with a set of design recommendations to foster incidental mentorship networks in online content-based communities, with the caveat that such recommendations might only be successful in communities structured similarly to those studied here and not as successful in commercial communities that monetarily (or otherwise) incentivize participation.
2. Lurking in content-based online communities
[2.1] Almost all content-based online communities include lurkers, users who simply consume content without any visible participation (Nonnecke et al. 2004). Lurkers might have a variety of motivations, such as their needs being satisfied by simply consuming content (Nonnecke et al. 2004), personal bashfulness or social anxiety (Nonnecke and Preece 2000), and fears of messing up in front of more knowledgeable or popular members (Preece, Nonnecke, and Andrews 2004), among others. Several communities also create environments that might force users into lurking by establishing community hierarchies where lurkers are assigned the lowest position in the hierarchy with the least respect (Preece and Shneiderman 2009).
[2.2] The vitality of many online communities (especially corporate-owned for-profit ones) depends on user traffic and activity, making it important to engage lurkers. A common strategy is to encourage community leaders to actively work toward engaging less-active or inactive members (Kim 2006; Preece, Nonnecke, and Andrews 2004) through means such as encouraging them to perform peripheral community tasks toward more active participation (Lave and Wenger [1991] 2001). While this might be effective, it presents some problems. If users do not explicitly sign up to mentor others, the involuntary burden of mentorship work might impose too much labor and lead to burnout as they themselves withdraw from the community (Dosono and Semaan 2019). It might also result in pressuring lurkers who are not yet comfortable or prepared to participate more actively, instead turning them away (Preece, Nonnecke, and Andrews 2004). Such an urge to engage users also discredits lurking as a valid form of participation (Antin and Cheshire 2010), through platform architectures that incentivize participation through economic benefits while exploiting user labor for financial gain.
[2.3] While there might be benefits to encouraging lurkers to participate more actively in online communities, and the means to provide such encouragement might produce some success, it is important to respect the individual choices of both lurkers and active community members. We are interested in studying ways to engage lurkers that do not place extra work on a small group of perceived leaders or active members, without pushing silent members to start participating faster than they are comfortable doing, while honoring periods of silent participation amid spells of more active engagement. We thus turn to studying online fan fiction communities.
3. Silent and active participation in online fan fiction communities
[3.1] Online fan fiction communities, through platforms such as Fanfiction.net and AO3, afford several types of participation through different degrees of activity. Users on such platforms can simply exist by consuming stories without creating their own, the mode of participation that is perhaps the closest to the traditionally understood lurker role. Readers of stories may also leave written reviews (and one-click Kudos on AO3) to express their appreciation or other opinions about the story. Users may also author their own work in the form of single or multichapter stories, either individually or collaboratively. We refer to these roles as Readers, Reviewers, and Authors, respectively. While such communities afford other forms of participation such as beta reading, tag wrangling, designing and writing code, content moderation, and several others (see Glenhaber 2021; Johnson 2014; Stanfill and Lothian 2021; and Turk 2014 for research on these roles), we focus on these three in this article because these are the primary roles with respect to the content-based nature of the community.
[3.2] Although these three roles are comparable to modes of participation in other content-based online communities, there are some ways in which online fan fiction communities afford key differences. As opposed to some communities where users are required to earn the right to participate in certain ways and unlock levels of access with time and activity, online fan fiction communities such as Fanfiction.net and AO3 afford direct participation in any of the three aforementioned roles from the moment of entry into the community. Further, traversal across roles is purely nonlinear and prominently includes returning to the Reader stage as users take breaks from writing stories/reviews to simply observe those of others (Black 2009). Such traversal may occur frequently, often in the same session. These communities do not have a definite hierarchical structure due to "an absence of imposed social roles or obligatory knowledge" (Black 2007, 133). While some Authors may acquire substantial followings within their fandom due to high community engagement and regular publication of good content, they do not attain explicit titles and may themselves be Readers or Reviewers of popular Authors in other fandoms. User choice to write reviews/stories is welcome but not required since peripheral participation as Readers is perfectly valid (Fiesler et al. 2017). The honoring of peripheral participation in online fan fiction spaces such as Fanfiction.net and AO3 is one of the most important reasons we chose to study them, because unlike other content-based online communities like TikTok, Instagram, or Meta, there is no capitalistic incentive, monetary or otherwise, that pushes users to participate more actively in such spaces or for the platforms themselves to profit as a result of increased user participation. We examine how these and other community structures and platform affordances might motivate silent users to become more active without pushing them beyond their comfort zones and without demanding extra labor from more active Authors. In particular, it is important for us to focus on the notion of not demanding additional labor from active Authors and Reviewers, since they not only do the visible work of actively producing content but also play an often invisibilized role in creating community in fandom spaces through "the production and maintenance of affective ties" (Stanfill and Condis 2014, ¶ 3.4). We examine how these and other community structures and platform affordances might motivate silent users to become more active without pushing them beyond their comfort zones and without demanding extra labor from more active Authors.
[3.3] Online fan fiction communities also have extensive histories of distributed mentoring networks (Campbell et al. 2016). Through informal networks, participants leverage the community structure to align based on similar interests, forming many-to-one relationships, which take the burden off a single mentor. These mentorship networks are usually between active users, such as Reviewers providing feedback to Authors, and are usually intentional since Reviewers actively help Authors' work improve through constructive feedback (Evans et al. 2017), and though mentors might not consider it burdensome, it does take time and effort and deserves to be recognized as additional labor and work (Andrejevic 2009).
[3.4] Online fan fiction communities thus stand as excellent examples of platforms that both afford and support lurking, as well as provide opportunities for users to move back and forth between multiple roles, including silent participation, all without demanding additional labor from active users to facilitate such movement.
4. Platform affordances, norms, and user behavior
[4.1] Beyond community cultures, the behavior of users in online communities is also greatly influenced by the specific platform on which such communities exist. Platforms form "the hardware and software design of standardized computing systems" (Montfort and Bogost 2009, 2) and the nature of platform affordances, that is, actions that users find perceivable (Norman 2013), dictate the cultures of users and their behaviors (Anable 2018).
[4.2] The types of affordances offered by every platform often dictate user behavior and, for our interests, also influence lurking patterns and practices. Most content-based platforms, both text-based ones such as Twitter and media-based ones such as TikTok, allow signing up and consuming content without posting or creating one's own, affording lurking as a way to ease into them (McCarthy 2022). Some platforms, such as TikTok, also afford a guest mode or anonymous browsing, allowing users to consume existing content at their own pace and comfort. Conversely, platforms such as Facebook/Meta provide users with Top Fan or Top Commenter badges as markers rewarding high participation, which implicitly pushes users to participate more actively and chase such markers (Yen, Hsu, and Huang 2011).
[4.3] Platform usage is also determined by their policies and norms, with changes in policies sometimes leading to changes in membership or the ways in which users participate. For instance, Tumblr's 2018 ban on adult or NSFW (not safe for work) content and the 2006–7 LiveJournal strikethrough caused massive uproar among respective user bases, driving hundreds of users into lurking as they felt suppressed and excluded by the policy changes (Haimson et al. 2021; Heeg 2023; Pilipets and Paasonen 2022). Similarly, when platforms demonstrate a general unwillingness to adopt user feedback or concerns into design, they promote displeasure and exodus (Fiesler and Dym 2020). Conversely, positive policies attract a lot of users, such as AO3's strong copyright protection of fannish work being an important reason it emerged as the fastest growing online fan fiction community (Fiesler and Dym 2020).
[4.4] Online communities have a multitude of affordances and norms that have powerful influences on user behavior and participation. In this article, we study how users participate on platforms such as Fanfiction.net and AO3, with a focus on how user interaction with existing platform affordances within platform norms gives rise to incidental mentorship networks.
5. The current study
[5.1] We adopted a mixed methods approach, combining a survey with a series of supplemental interviews. Surveys were distributed through Tumblr posts, inviting participation from current members of Fanfiction.net and AO3 who are either current lurkers or had been lurkers at some point. Though we acknowledge the potential participation bias in recruiting from the secondary platform Tumblr, we felt that Tumblr afforded better recruitment opportunities than did Fanfiction.net or AO3 by being able to display a post on potential participants' dashboards.
[5.2] Respondents were surveyed about their membership on either platform, with specific attention to their reasons for not actively participating and what they considered "active participation" to mean. For those who identified as current lurkers or as having gone through periods of silent participation, we asked them to expand on those experiences with questions about their reasons. In this question, we did not mention our defined roles but instead used the lowercase noun-forms of "reader," "reviewer," and "author," to avoid respondents answering inaccurately due to a misunderstanding of our definitions. We received a total of 369 responses.
[5.3] Within the survey, we also offered opportunities to discuss these topics with us further through 30–45 minute semistructured interviews. Respondents who volunteered for an interview were asked for their consent to be recorded and quoted for this article. While it is the norm within interview-based research to anonymize interviewee quotes, we wanted to honor the social norm of attribution within fan communities (Dym and Fiesler 2020; Fiesler and Bruckman 2014) and offered them the chance to not be anonymous, but all our participants chose to be anonymized for privacy. We interviewed sixteen participants, hereafter referred to as P1–P16. Interviewees were compensated with fifteen-dollar gift cards, or the equivalent amount in their preferred currencies, for their participation.
[5.4] We asked interviewees about their participation in online fan fiction communities and how they participated. For interviewees who identified primarily as readers or underwent major periods of Readership, we inquired about their experiences as readers and, for those who then became active, how they made that decision. We also asked users to contrast their participation in online fan fiction communities (Fanfiction.net and AO3) with their participation in other online communities (e.g., TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook), inquiring about platform affordances that constrained or aided intended behaviors. The recruitment and consent procedures and contents of the interview protocol and survey were all approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the authors' university.
6. Readership practices
[6.1] We received a total of 369 responses to our survey from current and former lurkers on Fanfiction.net and AO3. Among respondents, 91.1 percent (336/369) indicated going through at least some periods of silent consumption of existing stories during their membership in their communities. Of these 336, 94.3 percent mentioned going through one or more spells of Readership and then moving into more active participation, while the rest remained in Readership. Of respondents, 12.2 percent mentioned exclusively consuming existing content and not publicly participating at all.
[6.2] Our survey findings reveal Readership to be a common practice among members of online fan fiction communities. This is an expected yet important confirmatory finding since it allows us to compare Readership to lurking on other online communities while also studying key differences. We observed a large number of respondents going through spells of Readership and moving in and out of those, motivating us to study how they leveraged platform affordances and community norms during such transitions. Common reasons for why users chose Readership—we call them reasons as opposed to barriers to more active participation because not all instances were such that users wanted to participate more actively but felt obstructed—were a lack of community pressure to be more active, low self-confidence, and challenging circumstances in personal lives. We elaborate on these below.
[6.3] A primary theme that emerged from interviews was that users never felt pressured to participate any differently than they were comfortable doing. This was especially true for users undergoing periods of Readership between more active spells.
[6.4] Writing is hard, and sometimes life happens and you don't have the time or energy to write. Like, I wasn't able to write all through grad school because I simply didn't have the time. I only picked it back up after. (P7)
[6.5] From 2015–18, some stuff happened and I lost my ability to write. It was hard at first with all the update requests but I wrote about how I'm taking a break due to some personal stuff and people got it. (P5)
[6.6] Active users felt confident enough to take breaks from participation during difficult periods in their lives, safe in the knowledge that the community would remember them, and that if and when they decided to become active again, they would be welcomed back with open arms with no loss of reputation. They attributed this to both the supportive community and the absence of platform-induced pressure to maintain levels of engagement to acquire or retain a marker.
[6.7] I like how I can basically just pick up wherever I left off anytime. Compare this to things like "Top Fan" badges on Facebook where you gotta maintain a rate of commenting to keep that badge, and it makes the thing more like a job I gotta do everyday. At that point, it's less fun. (P11)
[6.8] This absence of markers of activity enhanced users' abilities to participate at their own comfort, keeping participation organic without it feeling like work. For a community where users largely participate at their leisure, it is important to not make it feel burdensome, and the lack of markers like Top Fan (or Top Reviewer, the imagined equivalent) badges contributes toward preserving that.
[6.9] Readers who found themselves ready to be more active were appreciative of the fact that they could step up their participation in the community at their own pace.
[6.10] I realized that I didn't have to be well-known to start, so I published as soon as I was ready. I saw people saying it was their first time writing, and those people got the same amount of love as someone who was pretty popular. (P8)
[6.11] I really like how there are basically no restrictions on when and how I can write or review. Not like other forums where you have to have like a certain number of points to be able to unlock posting privileges or something. (P2)
[6.12] Participants were appreciative of the nonhierarchical nature of the community, where they could participate however they wished to at any given time and at their own comfort levels. Readers were able to either ease into participation by writing reviews and waiting until they were personally confident enough to be an Author or directly jump into Authorship when they felt prepared. This nonhierarchical nature, a feature of fan communities since their early days (Black 2007), is implemented on platforms by not providing barriers to entry or tiers of participation that can be unlocked through patterns of activity. While platforms might have valid reasons for such tiered design, the absence of such a hierarchy within these online fan fiction communities both retains the spirit of fan culture and affords opportunities to participate at their own comfort levels.
[6.13] Members' abilities to freely traverse user roles allowed them to participate in the community on their own terms and immediate comfort levels. This is also due to the lack of social pressure to attain one role or another, because there is no higher social desirability attached with any role. As one survey respondent said, "Someone has to be the audience and cheer on, and I'm fine with that."
[6.14] We observe that Readership is a common form of participation in online fan fiction communities, both as a user's only role or as a role they can move in and out of. In the next section, we highlight some ways in which users emerged from Readership into more active participation and the impact of community norms and platform affordances in such moves.
7. Incidental mentorship
[7.1] The most common reason that our participants mentioned behind their returns to active participation after a period of Readership was that they drew inspiration from the community, either from individual members or from the collective. Such inspiration came from several sources due to several different actions of active members, likely without the knowledge of or any extra effort from those members.
[7.2] Members going through Readership due to low authorship confidence spoke about drawing inspiration from active members who gave detailed insights about their writing processes and laid out templates that they themselves could follow.
[7.3] I'd found another writer in my fandom at the time who had written dozens of stories that appealed to some of my niche interests, and he wrote a lot about his process of writing and ideation and character sketches and getting over writer's block. In many ways, he's what convinced me to try writing. (survey respondent, not interviewed)
[7.4] There was this one person who wrote really detailed reviews, going almost paragraph by paragraph for each chapter. I really liked how they did it and so when I wrote my first review, I tried to do it like that. I figured it would be really helpful to the author. (P4)
[7.5] Readers who had ideas for what type of stories they wanted to produce but were unsure about how to do it well found inspiration from seeing active Reviewers and Authors talk about their writing processes in great detail. Budding Authors/Reviewers doubting their own abilities observed successful techniques and found assurance in publicly participating in ways that they knew would be favorable. This was made easier by platform affordances on AO3 such as bookmarks, where Readers could save particular stories for the future and easily return to them when they needed to. While saving stories for later is a fairly common feature on most content-based online communities, perhaps what sets AO3's bookmarking feature apart from other similar Save for Later affordances is the ability to also see what others have bookmarked. This is particularly relevant through a mentorship lens because it allows budding Authors/Reviewers to look up to not only an Author's writing for inspiration but also works that the incidental mentor in question appreciates, for further sources of inspiration. At the same time, it does not demand additional labor of the Author, because they are already creating bookmarks for their own reasons and need not dedicate extra energy to disseminate the list of bookmarks.
[7.6] Members experiencing Readership due to low personal confidence or fears of negative engagement also found similar strength from expressive community members.
[7.7] English isn't my first language so, in spite of having many ideas, I wasn't confident enough to post something. I was very surprised when I realized one of my favorite writers is Korean and English is also not her first language, so I thought that if she can do it then I can try too. (survey respondent, not interviewed)
[7.8] I suffer from a lot of social anxiety, and so I benefited greatly from seeing lots of authors and reviewers acknowledge their own social anxieties and push through to put themselves out there, and that honestly showed me that even with this anxiety, I can write. (P12)
[7.9] Seeing other Authors/Reviewers openly talk about their struggles and unapologetically be their truest selves gave hesitant Readers the confidence they needed to participate actively. This was made possible by a very important feature of online fan fiction communities: Author's Notes (A/Ns). A/Ns offer Authors the unique opportunity "to enter a negotiation of meaning with their readers" (de Bruin 2019, ¶ 2.1) and provide information about the story, their lives, writing processes, or really anything that they wish. Aside from their important role in granting agency and authority to Authors (Herzog 2012), A/Ns are "fan writer's direct communications with the audience" (Black 2008, 28) and are important in mentorship networks because budding Authors can obtain a vital peek behind the curtain (Goffman 1959), gaining insight into an Author's process that they can attempt to replicate or draw inspiration from. While Fanfiction.net did not have a dedicated notes field and Authors would add such notes to the top of their stories, AO3 introduced a Notes feature. Regardless, community members have adopted a collective norm of including A/Ns either at the top or the bottom of stories, clearly labeled and identifiable.
[7.10] Participants also spoke about the importance of observing interactions between community members, even without being a part of those conversations, as motivating factors for their more active participation, but not to the point where they felt pressured to participate. This was true for Readers with low authorship or personal confidence, as well as those with low participatory energy.
[7.11] I watched several back and forth conversations between authors and reviewers where the author thanked reviewers for their comments and how that motivated them to write more. I wanted to contribute toward the author and be of help. (survey respondent, not interviewed)
[7.12] I was a pretty active writer, but then I spent quite a long time away from writing. During these times, I would read my friends' stories and watch them chat in the Comments and casually mention me or how they missed my writing. Even though they didn't really know if I was reading or not. I knew that when I would come back, I'd get the same love I'd gotten before. (P1)
[7.13] Participants who went through periods of Readership before becoming active all spoke about the importance of the incredibly positive nature of the community, which alleviated concerns about their work receiving harsh criticism. While this positivity is not ensured by any particular platform affordances on spaces such as Fanfiction.net and AO3, it has become a noticeable norm and feature of fan communities (Campbell et al. 2016; Evans et al. 2017).
[7.14] We find evidence of the impacts of both individual community members and the larger community culture on Readers' decisions to participate more actively. The key similarity across all these observations is that the community members that Readers drew inspiration from or modeled themselves after likely were unaware of such an impact of their work and were not required to expend additional energy in such mentorship practices.
[7.15] We observe strong evidence of Readers who went on to participate more actively by closely studying the work of some active Authors/Reviewers, who provided behind-the-scenes glimpses into their writing processes, highlighting the successes and challenges along the way. Readers mentioned drawing inspiration either directly implementing the writing suggestions in their own work or from observing their journey through struggles and believing that they too could overcome their own struggles. This likely happened without the Authors/Reviewers realizing that they were providing mentorship and not having additional involuntary burdens placed on them. Such Authors/Reviewers became incidental mentors to several Readers, motivating them to actively participate without knowingly engaging in mentorship work.
[7.16] Such incidental mentorship networks were not only centered around one or more individual Authors/Reviewers who Readers looked up to but were boosted by the collectively positive and supportive nature of the community. Readers saw an abundance of positive reviews and social support from community members, captured through conversations between active members. A supportive community atmosphere, where everyone feels safe and welcome, was integral to encouraging Readers to participate more actively. Such an atmosphere helped break down barriers of access and reduced perceived pressures on members to participate in ways that could be seen as socially desirable. The nonhierarchical nature of the community also allowed Readers to participate at their own degree of comfort. The lack of social desirability of any given role allowed Readers to become more active at their own pace, without the pressure of attaining a role faster to gain popularity, and also allowed active members to step down their participation when they needed to without any loss of status or reputation.
8. Making a case for fostering incidental mentorship networks
[8.1] Our findings reveal the strong presence of incidental mentorship, both in one-to-one and many-to-one networks, within online fan fiction communities. We believe that such networks are beneficial both for the success of individual members and overall growth of the community, and that designers of content-based online communities consider making active efforts toward fostering them.
[8.2] We observe that one of the most common beneficiaries of incidental mentorship networks are Readers who have an intent to become more active but do not have the confidence to take the plunge. While such a lack of confidence might be down to individual reasons unique to everyone, there might be an underlying factor common across several readers—marginalization. Online fan fiction communities often house users from different marginalized communities (Floegel 2020; Llewellyn 2022; Yin et al. 2017) and provide refuge by being nonjudgmental of one another. Such communities are usually respectful and welcoming of different marginalizations and identities, celebrating everyone for their uniqueness where the same unique qualities might draw ridicule or oppression in the outside world. While fandom is by no means perfectly inclusive of all identities and, as authors of color, we acknowledge that there is work to be done in handling questions of race/racism (Pande 2016; Pande and Moitra 2017), users with traditionally marginalized identities may find safe spaces here and in other such heterotopias (Dym et al. 2019; Llewellyn 2022), where they can grow to be confident in their own identities and translate such confidence into their lives beyond these communities and in the face of those who would suppress or oppress them.
[8.3] It is in the building of such confidence that informal mentorship networks play a strong and indisputable role. Incidental mentorship is not simply constrained to gaining confidence in becoming a more active Author/Reviewer, because such confidence transcends on-platform participation. When a closeted user observes another user openly embrace their sexuality and write about their favorite queer ships, or someone struggling with language proficiency watches another gradually develop command over the language by writing and receiving feedback, mentorship networks are formed without the mentors' knowledge. Such mentorship extends well beyond writing fan fiction, providing mentees with confidence that applies to their workplaces, family lives, and other off-platform spaces.
[8.4] Users who are marginalized outside the platform benefit from incidental mentorship networks and find refuge in the safe spaces that such platforms provide. Online communities generally have a strong potential to be empowering and accepting of marginalized identities (Downing 2013; Pettid 2008), although in practice most communities practice varying degrees of covert or overtly discriminatory policies (Noble 2018). Fostering of incidental mentorship networks to strengthen the possibility of users making connections must be accompanied by serious introspection into platform policies to avoid fostering connections that lead to radicalization of users into extremist ideologies (Ribeiro et al. 2020).
9. Design recommendations for online content-based communities
[9.1] Prior to providing recommendations for designers of content-based online communities to foster incidental mentorship networks on their platforms, we must provide the caveat that these recommendations might only apply to communities structured similarly to the ones studied here. One of the key reasons we selected online fan fiction communities such as AO3 to study in this article is that because of the way these platforms are structured, they do not stand to monetarily gain from increased user activity; neither do individual users have opportunities to directly make profits off their AO3 activity. The incidental mentorship networks mentioned above have room to form and grow organically, which might not be the case on commercial for-profit platforms like TikTok and Reddit. As for-profit platforms become more and more adept at exploiting free labor from their users for their own economic gain (Andrejevic 2009), we acknowledge that the design recommendations we propose might contribute to that. Nevertheless, we put them forward in the hope that they are not misused.
[9.2] We observed that a primary way in which incidental mentorship networks formed between active users and Readers was when active users provided extra behind-the-scenes looks into their writing techniques and difficulties, primarily through Author's Notes (A/Ns). A/Ns are a feature that is relatively unique to online fan fiction communities but provides a great addition to both the authors and readers of stories. We recommend that designers of other content-based online communities build in similar affordances where posters can provide additional notes, either related to the content creation processes or not. Active users leveraging such affordances might lead to the formation of incidental mentorship opportunities with lurkers.
[9.3] An important factor in engaging Readers was the positive and supportive nature of the community, generating an atmosphere that made them want to participate in and contribute to it. Such an atmosphere was created by community members and is a general hallmark of fan spaces. While creating a positive atmosphere might not be directly achievable as a simple result of building certain platform affordances, designers and members of content-based online communities alike can take inspiration from online fan fiction communities in this regard. This is particularly relevant on more traditional social media spaces such as Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook, which in recent years have acquired a notoriety for being toxic and negative (e.g., see Carpenter 2012; Mohan et al. 2017; Saveski, Roy, and Roy 2021). Additionally, fostering a positive community structure is something that designers of all types of content-based online communities should strive for, irrespective of their economic models.
[9.4] The nonhierarchical community structures also allowed Readers to begin participating how they want to without having to follow a fixed path of engagement and allowed active users to undergo periods of Readership and return at their own convenience without any loss of status or reputation. We encourage designers of content-based online communities to build affordances that allow users to customize their entry roles and role traversals and to become active at their own pace. One possible way to accomplish this is easing level-based access privileges (e.g., requiring users to post a certain number of comments on existing content before creating their own) and allowing users with preexisting content ideas to immediately participate without waiting to earn creative privileges.
[9.5] Similarly, another reason why Readers were able to participate at their own comfort levels is the lack of extra social desirability of any one role over others, especially Authorship. Most Readers did not chase Authorship, and the ones who did, did so because they had content ideas and not because they found Authorship more appealing. Readers prioritized participating at their own comfort levels rather than chasing the social desirability of a given role like Author. Designers of content-based online communities could work toward presenting all user roles as equal, through means such as hiding follower counts or badges earned by more engagement (such as Facebook's Top Commenter badge, which is likely a design choice intended to incentivize higher participation and in turn, increase economic gain for Facebook). However, we recognize that there might still be roles that are naturally more socially desirable, such as the appeal of high volumes of positive reviews that Authorship might bring, despite designers' best efforts toward equity.
10. Conclusion
[10.1] In this article, we examined participation in online fan fiction communities, discussing users' reasons for initially being silent consumers of content and then participating more actively. We explore how such transitions are greatly supported by the formation of incidental mentorship networks amid a supportive community, as lurkers draw motivation from seeing their favorite active users provide behind-the-scenes glimpses into their writing processes and struggles. Such incidental mentorship networks form without the knowledge of active users, at no extra labor on their part, and yet become pivotal to lurkers.
[10.2] Online communities are thriving sites of informal learning (Ghosh and Figueroa 2023; Sackey, Nguyen, and Grabill 2015; Sockett and Toffoli 2012) and encouraging higher participation would create a collectively better experience. We hope that designers of online communities will consider our recommendations as they continue to find newer ways to actively engage lurkers while not demanding extra labor from their currently active members.
11. Acknowledgments
[11.1] We thank our survey respondents and interviewees for their valuable time and insights, as well as our reviewers whose feedback undoubtedly made this article stronger.