When Social Fails: Quasi-experiments on the Effect of Utilizing Digitized Social Relations on Content Generation

Abstract

Digitized social relations (DSR) refer to the real-life social relations that are digitized into online formats. Although DSR are increasingly utilized by online content-sharing platforms, the economic value extracted from their utilization and the underlying mechanisms of their impacts are not clear, causing various concerns and challenges for practitioners. To address this research gap, this study empirically examines the effect of featuring content from contacts (FCFC), a utilization of DSR that shows and tops reviews to users who follow the reviewer through DSR. We propose that such a utilization raises privacy concerns for reviewers and leads to context collapse, which can decrease reviewer participation. It also triggers reviewers’ motivation for self-presentation, resulting in increased positivity bias in content generation. To test our hypotheses, we conduct empirical analyses of two serial design changes of a leading online review platform. The results from the FCFC design change confirm our hypotheses, showing that the FCFC-affected reviewers write fewer reviews, give higher ratings, and select more expensive merchants to review. The review volume decreases even more for reviewers who are privacy sensitive and for reviewers whose DSR followers are from heterogeneous social contexts, suggesting privacy concerns and context collapse as two mechanisms through which FCFC exerts an impact. The effects and the mechanisms are further validated by the results of analysis of a refinement design change, which shows that, once reviewers are provided with more controls over privacy and audience composition, the behavioral trends caused by FCFC discontinue. The findings add to the research streams of anonymity, self-presentation, and context collapse as well as provide important guidance for practitioners in regard to DSR-enabled feature designs.