In Internet culture, a lurker is typically a member of an online community who observes, but does not participate by posting or commenting. The exact definition depends on context. Lurkers make up a large proportion of all users in online communities. Lurking allows users to learn the conventions of an online community before they participate, improving their socialization when they eventually "de-lurk".
Lurkers are referred to using many names, including browsers, read-only participants, non-public participants, legitimate peripheral participants, vicarious learners, or sleepers.
History
Since the beginning of computer-mediated communication lurking has been a concern for community members. The term "lurk" can be traced back to when it was first used during the 14th century. The word referred to someone who would hide in concealment, often for an evil purpose. In the mid-1980s, the word started to be applied to the Internet when bulletin board systems became popular. The bulletin boards were accessed through a single phone line that users would call to upload files and post comments to share with the community. It was expected that those using the system and consuming resources would contribute. Because lurkers would keep the phone line busy for extended periods of time without contributing anything, they were often viewed negatively and would be barred by the system operator who managed the BBS.
Today, lurkers are viewed both positively and negatively. In many communities lurkers are still seen as free-riders. They are perceived as a drain on the public goods since they "take without giving back." However, some communities encourage newbies to lurk.
By lurking, newbies can learn more about the culture of the community, understand the community's social norms, and become familiar with the key members of the community. Lurkers are also viewed positively in present-day communities because they provide an audience for the mass media. Depending on the community, this may be consistent with the 90-9-1 principle.
Rationale
Lurkers lurk rather than participate for a variety of reasons. A majority of lurkers profess that they lurk simply because they think that browsing is enough for them. Lurking on social media can also be a form of receptive reading, whereby users seek to understand the opinions of those with a divergent point of view.
In much of the published literature, "lurking" is treated as a personal trait. However, concepts of legitimate peripheral participation and "de-lurking"
Potential benefits
Lurker benefits
Lurking behavior provides some benefits to users. Mo and Coulson found that lurkers on an online support group for HIV/AIDS did not differ from posters in their levels of care, self-efficacy, optimism, depression, and loneliness. They also found that lurkers felt more energetic than posters.
In a study that addressed lurking in E-learning, scholars found evidence that lurking is a helpful type of participation in online courses. Students said that the most common reasons they lurked before posting were to discover a message to reply to, to identify a model to adopt, to bypass providing a similar reply, and to acquire knowledge regarding the topic. Lurkers often take the time before posting to evaluate the group for how well it is a fit for them. Soroka and Raffaeli define cultural capital as "the knowledge that enables an individual to interpret various cultural codes." In other words, it is the knowledge of the norms of the community. They found that people that lurk longer before posting had greater levels of cultural capital. A lurker can gain cultural capital in a community just by spending a lot of time in it. A person that has more cultural capital will benefit more from the community.
Benefits for others
In their study on interactive mailing lists, Takahashi, Fujimoto, and Yamasaki demonstrated that "active lurkers", or individuals who spread content from an online group to individuals external to the online group, help spread beneficial information to surrounding communities.
Lurkers can also develop stores of valuable knowledge as they lurk which may be helpful later should they decide to contribute. For example, users in open source software communities can quickly discover the answers to common problems, making them more likely to contribute answers later. If they have already had a question answered, they are even more likely to de-lurk and reciprocate. These behaviors form the backbone of open source technical support.
Lurkers also help reduce the burden on communities. A person who may have a question for a community may be better served searching for the answer than forcing community members to expend effort to see and respond to their query. In the case of open source project communities, the vast majority of questions have already been asked and answered in the community, making any repeated questions wasted work. Lurkers might also take pieces of content featured in communities without seeking consent, violating the rules of the community. As a result, while individuals in online communities may feel that they are experiencing private interactions, a lurker may see it as a public space for observation due to their reduced feelings of belonging. This can become quite extreme in more intimate communities such as chat rooms where lurkers are more obvious. Hudson and Bruckman entered IRC chatrooms as experimenters and either posted a message stating they were logging the chat, an opt-in message for logging, and opt-out message, or nothing at all. 63.3% of chat rooms kicked out the experimenters after they gave any sort of message, demonstrating a dislike of explicit chat logging. However, 29% of rooms kicked out the experimenters even though they did not post anything, showing a disregard for lurkers.
Free-riding
Lurking is just one form of free-riding that can happen within an Internet community, and is similar to asking questions without responding, or gathering information without distributing it. Lurking is seen as undesirable to communities because of the risk free-riding can have on the community if every member does it. A public good is something that is impossible to exclude someone from and has a joint supply within the community. An Internet community is seen as a public good because it is a pool of data to which people may, if they choose, separately contribute information. The survival of the community is then dependent on the contributions of the members.
Since it is impossible to exclude members from sharing in the benefit of the public good, people are more motivated to free-ride on the work of the other members and not contribute themselves. Individuals are less likely to contribute if they do not view their contribution as making a visible difference and if they expect the other members to provide enough content to reach the desired effect. The amount of lurking within a community is correlated with the topic of the community, the size of the community, and the amount of traffic within the community. The number of lurkers is nearly double in technical support groups compared to health support groups. The nature of the topic may be responsible for the difference in the number of lurkers. The number of members in the community can also affect the amount of lurking that takes place. As the number of members in a group rises, the percentage of lurkers also rises. Within a given group size, the groups with higher traffic tend to have a lower percentage of lurkers.
De-lurking
When lurkers decide to participate in the community, they "de-lurk," which Rafaeli, Ravid, and Soroka define as: "...transfer from passive participation (only visiting the forum to read) to active participation (actively posting opinions and thoughts on the forum)". According to Burke et al., group-oriented membership claims are when new users introduce themselves to the online community by describing their undertakings in learning about the community; the authors provide the following example: "I've been lurking around your discussion group for a few weeks now. Just reading and trying to soak in some knowledge I guess". Correlational results in Study 1 showed that messages with group-oriented membership claims elevated community member responses by 38 percent, while experimental results in Study 2 showed that placing group-oriented membership claims into Usenet posts elevated community member responses by 6 percent.
Lurking to participation
Some researchers have discovered positive links between social capital, cultural capital, and de-lurking.
According to Rafaeli et al., "...community virtual social capital is 'a collection of features of the social network created as a result of virtual community activities that lead to development of common social norms and rules that assist cooperation for mutual benefit'" (p. 4). Resnick, Janney, Buis, and Richardson introduced a community element to the online walking program called Stepping Up to Health and discussed various issues of beginning an online community, including transforming lurkers into users.
While Rashid et al. did not examine lurkers directly, they conducted an experimental study on MovieLens that investigated how to raise low contribution rates in online communities. They do not leave visible traces and it is often difficult to address them directly. To study lurkers, often Internet communities such as email-based discussion lists, public forums, and community building tools will be targeted so communication can be tracked more easily.