The Power of the Ask in Social Media

Social computing and social media systems depend on contri-butions from users. We posit the existence of a latent demand for contribution: many users want to contribute but don’t. We then test a simple interface that can induce these users to ac-tually contribute: we display a popup window asking users to contribute. In a real-world randomized field experiment, we found that asking them to contribute right now is ineffective, but reminding the users to contribute actually leads to approx-imately a 23 % increase in contributions with no reduction in quality. However, this effect wanes as users habituate to the popups. Author Keywords power of the ask, social media, social computing, discussio