Consequences of Information Feed Integration on User Engagement and Contribution: A Natural Experiment in an Online Knowledge-Sharing Community

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Cao, Zike; Zhu, Yingpeng; Li, Gen; Qiu, Liangfei
• 署名单位: Zhejiang University; University of Macau; Fudan University; State University System of Florida; University of Florida
• 刊物名称: INFORMATION SYSTEMS RESEARCH
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1047-7047
• DOI: 10.1287/isre.2022.0043
• 发表日期: 2024
• 页码: 1114-1136
• 关键词: generated content evidence; SELF-PRESENTATION; regression discontinuity; presentation format; CONTEXT COLLAPSE; schema congruity; decision-making; social ties; QUALITY; incentives

摘要

Many online communities that rely on effortful, voluntary content contributions offer additional content curation tools to facilitate social interactions and encourage user contributions. Any platform that offers two or more heterogeneous content types (e.g., expert knowledge and social posts) faces a choice about the presentation format: whether to display the content types separately or in an integrated information feed. We leverage a natural experiment on Zhihu, a Q&A platform that offers a social-interaction-oriented functionality called Ideas. Zhihu initially presented answers (expert knowledge content) and ideas (social posts) in two different information feeds, but the platform integrated ideas into the same information feed as answers in June 2019. We find that information feed integration significantly decreased user engagement with and contribution of both ideas and answers. We hypothesize that users decreased their engagement because the juxtaposition of incongruous types of content increased mindset switching and cognitive strain. This hypothesis is supported by an additional laboratory experiment. We also present evidence showing that contributions decreased both because of the decrease in engagement (weaker social recognition incentives) and because integration heightened concerns that posting ideas would dilute the contributor's professional image. Our findings have important theoretical and practical implications for any platform that hosts heterogeneous content.