research-article

Studying and Understanding Characteristics of Post-Syncing Practice and Goal in Social Network Sites

Authors:

Ning GuAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB), Volume 15, Issue 4

Article No.: 16, Pages 1 - 26

https://doi.org/10.1145/3457986

Published: 14 June 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Many popular social network sites (SNSs) provide the post-syncing functionality, which allows users to synchronize posts automatically among different SNSs. Nowadays there exists divergence on this functionality from the view of sink SNS. The key to solving this problem is to understand the characteristics of users’ post-syncing practice and goals and evaluate whether they are consistent with an SNS’s norms, cultures, and goals. However, studying and understanding the characteristics of post-syncing practice and goal are challenging tasks as a result of the difficulty of data sampling and the complexity of post-syncing behavior. In this article, we focus on investigating this question by quantitative analysis in combination with qualitative analysis. In the quantitative study, by utilizing 211,233 synced-posts sampled from Weibo, we aim to investigate characteristics of post-syncing from three perspectives: user, content, and goal. The results suggest that post-syncing plays an important role in exhibiting one’s current activities, creations, and skills as well as advertisements but involves a risk of exhibiting personal sensitive profiles. To understand the results, we present an interview-based qualitative study based on thematic analysis. It indicates that the publicity, urgency, and remarkableness of contents and differences of social affordances and social circles between sink SNS and source SNS as well as the one-time consent of post-syncing authentication jointly account for the major role of post-syncing. Based on these results, we propose insights for post-syncing functionality’s adoption, design, and promotion.

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Index Terms

Studying and Understanding Characteristics of Post-Syncing Practice and Goal in Social Network Sites
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing
    1. Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing

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cover image ACM Transactions on the Web

ACM Transactions on the Web Volume 15, Issue 4

November 2021

152 pages

ISSN:1559-1131

EISSN:1559-114X

DOI:10.1145/3465465

Editor:
Brian D. Davison
Lehigh University, USA

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Copyright © 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.

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Publication History

Published: 14 June 2021

Accepted: 01 March 2021

Revised: 01 March 2021

Received: 01 July 2020

Published in TWEB Volume 15, Issue 4

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3697832
Gong YCosma GFinke A(2024)VITR: Augmenting Vision Transformers with Relation-Focused Learning for Cross-modal Information RetrievalACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data10.1145/368680518:9(1-21)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2024
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Zhang PZhou QLu TGu HGu N(2024)DeLink: An Adversarial Framework for Defending against Cross-site User Identity LinkageACM Transactions on the Web10.1145/364382818:2(1-34)Online publication date: 12-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643828
Zhang GZhang SYuan G(2024)Bayesian Graph Local Extrema Convolution with Long-tail Strategy for Misinformation DetectionACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data10.1145/363940818:4(1-21)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2024
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