When members perceive their contributed knowledge will be negatively perceived or have consequences, they refrain from contributing to the community. This results in a lower contribution overall, more social loafing, and less connection with the rest of the community.

To decrease perceived risk of contributing knowledge to the online communities, the community should:
- increase the knowledge quality
- decrease the media richness within the community

Decreasing social loafing in Online Communities through lowering perceived risk

Social ties relies on having a connection with other members within the community, The greater the amount of social ties, the more comfortable members are within the community and more likely to continue contribution, collaboration, and cohesion with other members of the community.

Ways to increase the social ties within an online community to further increase the connection between members
- anonymity of profiles
- more offline behavior/activities

Improving Social Ties in Online Communities

To improve the group cohesion of a community, there first needs to be a decrease in social loafing and lack of engagement. 
To decrease this, designs should work on:
- increasing social ties between members
- lowering perceived risk 

New York University

Social loafing is the tendency for individuals to devote less time or effort when working with others compared to working alone.

When an individual is not interacting with the rest of the group members, there is a lack of social cohesion and emotional connection amongst the group. Improving social loafing would lead to more equally distributed contribution and connection between all of the group members.

Social Loafing in Social Cohesion

Shiue, Y. C., Chiu, C. M., & Chang, C. C. (2010). Exploring and mitigating social loafing in online communities. Computers in Human Behavior, 26(4), 768-777.

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