  As online health communities (OHCs) grow, users find it challenging to
properly search, read, and contribute to the community because of its
overwhelming content. Our goal is to understand OHC users' needs and
requirements for better delivering large-scale OHC content. We interviewed 14
OHC users with interests in diabetes to investigate their attitudes and needs
towards using OHCs and 2 OHC administrators to assess our findings. Four
personas -Coddlers, Scientists, Adventurers, and Opportunists- emerged, which
inform users' interaction behavior and attitudes with OHCs. An individual can
possess the characteristics of multiple personas, which can also change over
time. Our personas uniquely describe users' OHC participation intertwined with
illness contexts compared to existing social types in general online
communities. We discuss broader implications back to the literature and how our
findings apply to other illness contexts in OHCs. We end with requirements for
personalized delivery of large-scale OHC content.
