Management Science · 2025 · Shuting Wang、Brad N. Greenwood
中文摘要
社交媒体平台激烈争夺在其站点上创作内容的用户。在本研究中,我们深入探讨这一竞争中一种日益流行但学术关注有限的做法——放宽字数上限(即每条帖子的最大字符数)——及其对社交媒体帖子生产与消费的影响。我们利用一项自然实验——中国一家领先的微博平台分阶段推行字数上限放宽——来研究这些问题。结果表明,放宽字数上限显著增加了个人用户的每日发帖数量。然而,值得注意的是,只有原本就活跃的用户在放宽后似乎发帖更多,活跃度较低的用户几乎未见变化。此外,结果显示,放宽字数上限增加了每条帖子获得的点赞数,表明放宽提升了内容质量,并可能在长期增加互动。这表明,通过允许更长的帖子,社交媒体平台能够促进帖子生成者与受众双方的互动(至少就点赞而言)。但研究结果同时表明,放宽字数上限有使内容创作进一步集中于少数活跃发声者的风险,从而使沉默的大多数在平台上变得更加不显眼。
Abstract
Social media platforms aggressively compete for the participants who create content on their sites. In this study, we delve into one tactic of this competition that has become increasingly popular but received limited scholarly attention—the extension of length limits (i.e., the maximum number of characters in a post)—and how it affects both the production and consumption of social media posts. We investigate these questions by exploiting a natural experiment, the phased rollout of length limit extensions on a leading Chinese microblog platform. Findings suggest that extending length limits significantly increased the number of daily posts of individual users. However, and strikingly, only already active users appear to post more after the extension with little observed change from less active users. Further, results show that extending length limits increases the number of likes each post receives, indicating that extensions improve content quality and may increase engagement in the long term. This suggests that, by permitting longer posts, social media platforms can facilitate engagement from both the post generators and audiences (at least in terms of likes). However, findings also suggest that extending length limits risks further concentrating content generation from the vocal minority, thereby making the silent majority less visible on the platforms.