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 () and Liangfei Qiu
Additional contact information
Zike Cao: Department of Data Science and Engineering Management, School of Management, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China
Yingpeng Zhu: Department of Accounting and Information Management, Faculty of Business Administration, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau, China
Gen Li: Department of Information Management and Business Intelligence, School of Management, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China

Information Systems Research, 2024, vol. 35, issue 3, 1114-1136

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.

Keywords: information feed integration; online Q&A communities; user-generated content (UGC); image concern; natural experiment; regression discontinuity in time (RDiT) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/isre.2022.0043 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:orisre:v:35:y:2024:i:3:p:1114-1136

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Information Systems Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().