Estimating Career Benefits from Online Community Leadership: Evidence from Stack Exchange Moderators

Many IT professionals seek to improve their job prospects by engaging as leaders of online communities, for example, by serving as a moderator or admin. We investigate whether such community leadership leads to (causal) improvements in individuals’ careers. We assemble a data set, including job histories of IT professionals who have sought election as moderators (mods) in Stack Exchange question-and-answer communities, between 2010 and 2020. We estimate the career benefits of moderatorship under two complementary identification strategies: difference-in-differences (DID) and regression discontinuity (RD). We observe qualitatively consistent results under each design, finding that election to a moderator role has a significant, causal, positive effect on job mobility. We estimate that moderatorship increases the probability of a job change by between 4.7 and 12.3 percentage points over the two years following the election. We also report a series of secondary analyses that speak to associated salary increases and show evidence consistent with the notion that social capital and signaling play a role. Our findings help us understand the benefits of online community leadership, and they extend our understanding of the motivations for online community engagement.