Untested
Evoke User's Visibility
More conscientious posts, reduced misconceptions of people unlike themselves
This counts, and relays back to the user, the number of distinct users who have seen a post or comment that user has made.
Different methodologies to count views could be used by different platforms, so long as they are consistent within the platform.
This view meter must be clear and distinct from other social metrics relayed back to users, such as the number of upvotes/likes, shares/retweets, &c.
The Prosocial Design Network suspects that this intervention could accomplish the following:
On social content, whenever a comment or post displays how many likes, reacts, or shares it has, it should also display how many people have viewed it— at a glance.
Researchers from Facebook combined survey and large-scale log data to examine how well users’ perceptions of their audience match their actual audience on Facebook. They found that social media users consistently underestimate their audience size for their posts, guessing that their audience is just 27% of its true size.
According to researchers from Facebook: "Users have scarce information about who actually sees their content, making their audience seem invisible and difficult to estimate." this can lead to over-disclosure and a lack of self-censorship.
A grade of Emergent is often given to interventions for whom the majority of research is qualitative.
Alternatively, if research exists, but the methodology is not publicly available, the Prosocial Design Network will also assign it an Emergent grade.
This grade denotes that the idea could have merit, but no quantitative research exists to explain why or how.
Michael Bernstein, Eytan Bakshy, Moira Burke, Brian Karrer
April 27, 2013
Min.
Total
Max.
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ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)
Research Article or Manuscript
Do you think this intervention could have more benefits, unacknowledged drawbacks, or other inaccuracies that we've neglected to mention here?
We always welcome more evidence and rigorous research to back up, debunk, or augment what we know.
If you want to be a part of that effort, we'd love to have your help!
Email us