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Preliminary user study for gratitude and reciprocity in a q&a system

The 90-9-1 rule is widely applied to online communities to describe a phenomenon of participation inequality [4]. The 90-9-1 rule states that 90% of users are "lurkers" who do not contribute, 9% are those who contribute from time to time, and only 1% of participants are highly active in the community and make most contributions. The question is: how can we motivate the inactive users to contribute? Previous research has shown that altruism is one of the most influential reasons for active contributors to participate [3, 10]. We present a new approach to promote altruism by capitalizing on reciprocity and gratitude in a Question & Answer (Q&A) system, in order to mitigate the participation inequality problem. In this paper, we introduce how gratitude and reciprocity can stimulate the intrinsic motivator, altruism, in our system EnishiSource. Also, we describe a user study with 8 participants and show our preliminary results.