Escape or return? Users’ intermittent discontinuance behavior in strong-ties social functions

Abstract

Intermittent discontinuance acts as a precursor to user loss and has become a crucial and challenging issue in the operation and management of social media. From the perspective of alternative competition, we integrate the push–pull–mooring framework and expectancy violation theory to explore how contradictory psychology occurs and impacts users’ intermittent discontinuance of strong-ties social functions (STSF). According to results obtained from partial least squares-structural equation modeling, both push (information overload, system feature overload, and usage fatigue) and pull (privacy concerns) factors cause intermittent discontinuance, while mooring factors (sunk costs, transition costs, and transition fatigue) reduce it. Transition fatigue mediates the relationship between transition costs and intermittent discontinuance. From the perspective of competitors, while alternative attractions do not significantly affect users’ intermittent discontinuance, transition costs and fatigue do exert a significant negative impact on it. The fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis results reveal that technology overload, usage fatigue, privacy concerns, and sunk costs are core antecedents of high-degree intermittent discontinuance. These results are expected to provide a reference for reducing the intermittent discontinuance of platforms and protecting the legitimate rights and interests of users.