Online communities develop unique characteristics, establish social norms, and exhibit distinct dynamics among their members. Activity in online communities often results in concrete ``off-line'' actions with a broad societal impact (e.g., political street protests and norms related to sexual misconduct). While community dynamics, information diffusion, and online collaborations have been widely studied in the past two decades, quantitative studies that measure the effectiveness of online communities in promoting their agenda are scarce. In this work, we study the correspondence between the effectiveness of a community, measured by its success level in a competitive online campaign, and the underlying dynamics between its members. To this end, we define a novel task: predicting the success level of online communities in Reddit's r/place - a large-scale distributed experiment that required collaboration between community members. We consider an array of definitions for success level; each is geared toward different aspects of collaborative achievement. We experiment with several hybrid models, combining various types of features. Our models significantly outperform all baseline models over all definitions of `success level'. Analysis of the results and the factors that contribute to the success of coordinated campaigns can provide a better understanding of the resilience or the vulnerability of communities to online social threats such as election interference or anti-science trends. We make all data used for this study publicly available for further research.

翻译：在线社区会发展出独特的特征，建立社会规范，并在成员之间展现出不同的动态。在线社区的活动常常导致具有广泛社会影响的具体“线下”行动（例如政治街头抗议和与性行为不端相关的规范）。尽管在过去二十年中，社区动态、信息传播和在线协作已被广泛研究，但衡量在线社区在推广其议程方面的有效性的定量研究仍然很少。在这项工作中，我们研究了社区的有效性（通过其在竞争性在线活动中的成功程度来衡量）与其成员间潜在动态之间的对应关系。为此，我们定义了一个新任务：预测Reddit的r/place社区——一项需要社区成员间协作的大规模分布式实验——中在线社区的成功程度。我们考虑了一系列成功程度的定义，每个定义针对协作成就的不同方面。我们尝试了多种混合模型，结合了不同类型的特征。我们的模型在所有“成功程度”定义上显著优于所有基线模型。对结果以及促成协调活动成功的因素的分析，可以更好地理解社区在面对选举干预或反科学趋势等在线社会威胁时的韧性或脆弱性。我们将本研究中使用的所有数据公开，以供进一步研究。