“After all the time I put into this”: co-creation and the end-of-life of social network games

User engagement in processes of co-design and co-creation are common practices in Social Network Games (SNGs). Though the interdependency between producer and user is of mutual benefit throughout much of the lifetime of an SNG, there are critical moments where this relationship becomes problematic. We adopt an ethnographic approach, covering the entire three year lifespan of a well-known SNG, with a focus on the ‘end of life’ experience from players’ perspectives. Our results show that, at the game’s discontinuation announcement, players reflect strongly on the value that they associate with their gameplay and its involvement. We suggest that the notion of players as co-creators may be undervalued by companies during strategic decision-making especially since at discontinuation players are left without ownership of their co-created product. This deeper understanding of players as co-creators serves as case study for developers building social games both on and off social networking platforms

Social determinants of content selection in the age of (mis)information

Despite the enthusiastic rhetoric about the so called \emph{collective intelligence}, conspiracy theories -- e.g. global warming induced by chemtrails or the link between vaccines and autism -- find on the Web a natural medium for their dissemination. Users preferentially consume information according to their system of beliefs and the strife within users of opposite narratives may result in heated debates. In this work we provide a genuine example of information consumption from a sample of 1.2 million of Facebook Italian users. We show by means of a thorough quantitative analysis that information supporting different worldviews -- i.e. scientific and conspiracist news -- are consumed in a comparable way by their respective users. Moreover, we measure the effect of the exposure to 4709 evidently false information (satirical version of conspiracy theses) and to 4502 debunking memes (information aiming at contrasting unsubstantiated rumors) of the most polarized users of conspiracy claims. We find that either contrasting or teasing consumers of conspiracy narratives increases their probability to interact again with unsubstantiated rumors.Comment: misinformation, collective narratives, crowd dynamics, information spreadin

Engaging audiences through social media in colleges of agricultural and environmental sciences

Seventy percent of Americans use social media to connect with one another, share information and entertain themselves (Pew, 2019). Of those connecting socially, it's estimated 79% of 18-29-year olds are using Facebook and 38% are using Twitter. With college students being active on social media, college departments are able to leverage these many platforms to engage with students meaningfully. What is not clear, is what are the most successful tactics these departments are using. The objectives of this study were to 1) understand how departments within a college of agriculture and natural resources use Twitter and Facebook to engage audiences, 2) determine the success of tactics based on the highest levels of engagement, and 3) understand whom popular posts are targeting. For this study, researchers gathered 16 months of analytical information from 4 academic departments. The top 5 Twitter posts from each month per department were used to determine the average number of impressions, engagements, and the overall engagement. For Facebook, the lifetime of a post's total reach and lifetime of engaged users were averaged. Tactics noted included if the post had a photo, video, link, hashtag, or tagged another page. The audience of each post was analyzed to track popular themes. For Twitter, 307 tweets were analyzed across 4 departments. The departments had 608 total engaging elements, while on Facebook, 303 posts were analyzed for 493 total engaging elements across departments. Results show departments are engaging with three main audiences: students, faculty/staff, and alumni. Posts with engaging elements of images and videos had higher levels of user engagement in all departments. Popular themes across platforms include students on campus, student organizations, research, and events. This study aligned with most previous social media research in that posts with engaging elements have more reach. It is important that departments continue to use such tactics to reach audiences.No embargoAcademic Major: Agricultural Communicatio

The Spontaneous Emergence of Social Influence in Online Systems

Social influence drives both offline and online human behaviour. It pervades cultural markets, and manifests itself in the adoption of scientific and technical innovations as well as the spread of social practices. Prior empirical work on the diffusion of innovations in spatial regions or social networks has largely focused on the spread of one particular technology among a subset of all potential adopters. It has also been difficult to determine whether the observed collective behaviour is driven by natural influence processes, or whether it follows external signals such as media or marketing campaigns. Here, we choose an online context that allows us to study social influence processes by tracking the popularity of a complete set of applications installed by the user population of a social networking site, thus capturing the behaviour of all individuals who can influence each other in this context. By extending standard fluctuation scaling methods, we analyse the collective behaviour induced by 100 million application installations, and show that two distinct regimes of behaviour emerge in the system. Once applications cross a particular threshold of popularity, social influence processes induce highly correlated adoption behaviour among the users, which propels some of the applications to extraordinary levels of popularity. Below this threshold, the collective effect of social influence appears to vanish almost entirely in a manner that has not been observed in the offline world. Our results demonstrate that even when external signals are absent, social influence can spontaneously assume an on-off nature in a digital environment. It remains to be seen whether a similar outcome could be observed in the offline world if equivalent experimental conditions could be replicated