A Mimetic Theory of User Behaviors in Online Communities: A Computational Study of GitHub

Online communities are virtual communities where users exchange knowledge, organize tasks, and accomplish work. We focus on how individual users influence the ways others behave. We draw from mimetic theory and leverage computationally intensive theorizing to examine the influence of popular developers on other developers in GitHub, the largest and most popular open source software development community. Analyzing a subsample of 324 projects, we find that the behavior of rockstars –i.e. exceptionally popular developers– is imitated by other developers, and thus strongly influences overall work patterns in projects. We further find that this effect is stronger when a rockstar is more active in a project. Our findings offer important contributions for research on online communities, specifically by shedding light on the significant role that individual actors can have in such communities. Crucially, to our knowledge, our study offers the first empirical evidence that online communities actually change user behaviors through memetic processes.