“The Dose Makes the Poison” - Exploring the Toxicity Phenomenon in Online Communities

Information technology usage has positive aspects, but it has been acknowledged that there also exist negative ones that must be studied in more depth. Behaviors such as teasing and abusing are a main concern for online community leaders. Indeed, they recurrently use the words “toxic” and “poison” to qualify behaviors threatening their communities’ survival. Online community health has been defined as the extent to which the vital systems of an online community are continuously performing normally. This definition is based on the metaphor of “online community as a living organism”, which brings the focus on the inner workings of communities and is particularly suited to study behaviors occurring within it. We mobilize this organismic metaphor and borrow ideas from the Toxicology discipline to propose a theory of toxicity in online communities. We offer an exploratory and illustrative empirical validation of the theory in the context of free/open source software communities