The power of the ask in social media

Social computing and social media systems depend on contributions from users. We posit the existence of a latent demand for contribution: many users want to contribute but don't. We then test a simple interface that can induce these users to actually contribute: we display a popup window asking users to contribute. In a real-world randomized field experiment, we found that asking them to contribute right now is ineffective, but reminding the users to contribute actually leads to approximately a 23% increase in contributions with no reduction in quality. However, this effect wanes as users habituate to the popups.