Proposing a Mitigating Stagnation Method to Expand Involvement in Discussions on Social Networking Services

Communication on Social Networking Services (SNS) provides limited information about the status of community members or a community itself. It makes members hesitating posting articles to SNS. To mitigate post stagnation is one of important issues when using SNS. In this study, we proposed a method to facilitate members participation in conversations on SNS through relieving members anxious about posting articles to SNS from a Group Awareness perspective. To relieve members, we proposed an idea of post-delaying when posting articles are concentrated: activity of posting articles are not only for sharing one’s thinking or ideas with members, but also tacitly sharing the information about "who is active" in a community. To verify the proposed method, we implemented an experimental system that delay posting articles on SNS. About one year’s worth of actual articles in a community used as the dataset for the experiment. The results showed that the stagnation period shortened from over five days to three days. Focusing on one-week cycle in the community, the proposed method is promising because it alleviates stagnation more than two days. However, the experiment used past articles, we should examine how actual community activities can be improved.