Tell me who its founders are and I'll tell you what your online community looks like: Online community founders' personality and community attributes

Online communities constitute a key outlet for individuals, satisfying diverse social and economic needs. Research has therefore been devoted to learning about the factors that predict their attributes and sustainability. Whereas we have some knowledge about the roles of community activity, network structure, and platform interface in shaping online community attributes, we know much less about the potential roles of community founders in general, and even less about the role of these founders' personal attributes. In the present study we focus on the personality traits of community founders as predictors of community attributes and sustainability. We develop a tool for estimating community members' Big Five personality traits from their social media text and use it to estimate the traits of 35,164 founders in 8625 Reddit communities. We find support for most of our predictions about the relationships between founders’ text-based personality markers and community sustainability and attributes, including the level of engagement within the community, aspects of its social network structure, and whether the founders themselves remain active in it.