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

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Published:14 June 2021Publication History
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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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    • Published in

      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
      Issue’s Table of Contents

      Copyright © 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 14 June 2021
      • Revised: 1 March 2021
      • Accepted: 1 March 2021
      • Received: 1 July 2020
      Published in tweb Volume 15, Issue 4

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