Consequences of Information Feed Integration on User Engagement and Contribution: A Natural Experiment in an Online Knowledge-Sharing Community
Zike Cao, Yingpeng Zhu, Gen Li, Liangfei Qiu
Information Systems Research · 2024 · Volume 35 · Issue 3
Abstract
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. History: Xiaoquan (Michael) Zhang served as the senior editor and Yili (Kevin) Hong served as associate editor for this article. Funding: Z. Cao acknowledges this research was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 72201238, 72192823]. G. Li acknowledges this research was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 72102047] and Shanghai Pujiang Program [Grant 21PJC006]. Supplemental Material: The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2022.0043 .
Keywords
information feed integration, online Q&A communities, user-generated content (UGC), image concern, natural experiment, regression discontinuity in time (RDiT)
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