Reciprocity in Reviewing on Fanfiction.Net

Abstract

The recent rise in online education and the accompanying difficulties encountered by both students and educators demonstrate the value of better understanding how online environments can facilitate learning and community. Fanfiction websites contain an enormous amount of original creative writing, primarily written by young people, offering an opportunity to examine informal learning within an online community. Previous research has shown that fanfiction encourages this informal learning through “distributed mentoring,” which occurs when members of an online community quickly and asynchronously receive abundant feedback, while giving others feedback in turn [1]. However, not all interaction in online communities has such a positive nature, as a study of massive open online courses found students who received longer feedback became less likely to reciprocate with similar effort when leaving peer reviews [4]. This study looked at reciprocity between fanfiction reviewers and found a moderate, statistically significant correlation between the quality of reviews given and received by fanfiction authors. These findings are valuable in understanding the ways in which members of online communities interact and learn from each other, an area that would benefit from further research.