10/29: Nicole Ellison

[ehuppert]

Comment below with questions or thoughts about the reading for this week's workshop.

Please make your comments by Wednesday 11:59 PM, and upvote at least five of your peers' comments on Thursday prior to the workshop. You need to use 'thumbs-up' for your reactions to count towards 'top comments,' but you can use other emojis on top of the thumbs up.

[NaiyuJ]

The topic is super interesting and extremely relevant to our daily lives. I have some questions about the eye-tracking construct:

• Firstly, I'm quite curious about how the eye-tracker exactly works. Is it valid enough to operationalize people's attention on certain posts using eye-tracking data?

• Secondly, the experiment performed a median split on participants' average viewing time as the classification of four "lurker" and "clicker". Is it possible that people may fundamentally differ in reading speed and reaction time? Would it be better if we compare each one's average time on different posts?

• Finally, participants in this experiment are those who are willing to participate. I guess that they can easily know the goal of this study, and the participants are from a university where people usually receive higher education. is it in some ways biased?

[luxin-tian]

Thanks for presenting this interesting work. As is suggested by @lulululugagaga , indeed there are times that click behaviors are done with somewhat deliberate meditation by an agent, especially when the agent knows that their behavior will be recorded or monitored. How does this may affect the conclusion?

[chrismaurice0]

Thank you for the really fascinating paper. It definitely made me think about my clicking/ non-clicking behaviors on social media. I have two questions: The first is on the age group you used. You state that you wanted to study a population that is not highly represented in the literature. I would love to hear more about the conversations around this idea. My thinking is that younger people are over-represented in the literature because they make up a larger portion of social media users. Further, I think younger people are at the forefront of changing behaviors of all individuals on social media. One quote really captured this idea: "I kind of do a quick mental evaluation of the social ramifications of my online presence.” This is how younger populations have behaved on social media since its inception-- did they drive this behavior or was it always there? I like to think the former, but who knows.

I am also curious as to why you choose to use Facebook as the social media to observe? Is it because there are more clicking opportunities that other apps like Instagram or Snapchat? Or is it because Facebook is the most popular app among the age group you were looking at?

[Qlei23]

Thank you for your intriguing research, it's an innovative topic to look at. My question is, can we use some digital log data to measure "non-clicking" behavior, for example, if one opens a facebook page and doesn't "click" in one minute. The bias of the log data might be large though. Also, I think there're other possible drivers of clicking on social media apart from interactions.

[goldengua]

It is very interesting to combine eye-tracking techniques with clicks and interviews. I was surprised by your finding that clicking is unrelated to the duration of viewing. I was wondering there is any 'compulsory' viewing. For example, the video is auto-play and clicking an unwanted video would end the play. On the other hand, I was curious how you would measure eye movement as it seems to be a complex behavior involving lots of regression and skipping.

[hihowme]

Thanks for your representation! This is a truly new and interesting topic about people's click behavior on social media on Facebook. I am wondering do you think some similar research method could be done regarding to the consumer's demand on advertisement? Thanks a lot.

[Leahjl]

Thank you for sharing this research! It is really interesting to learn the 'non-click'. I wonder how do you eliminate the influence of the facebook's algorithm, which may intentionally feed certain contents when studying the 'non-click'.

[yutianlai]

Thanks for sharing! I'm wondering how you differentiate intentional click and unintentional click.

[FranciscoRMendes]

Thank you for your research. I think this study would be interesting if replicated on a different social media platform, say, LinkedIn. The reason I say this is because Facebook is a "low-stakes" environment. A click or a non-click has less (if any) tangible cost or benefit to it. However, on a different social media platform this could lead to more compelling results.

Eye tracking is a rather invasive method of studying user behavior. I wonder if subjects changed their behavior knowing they were being studied.

Non-clicks are very interesting, not clicking something has a huge number of contributing and confounding factors. Which makes your study even more interesting.

I look forward to the talk!

[tianyueniu]

Thank you for sharing this research! I have a similar question regarding the scale of the analysis as some of the above comments have mentioned. What do you think would be an effective approach to scale up the analysis to further explore the complexity of non-clicking?

[egemenpamukcu]

Thank you for sharing your work. I have two broad questions.

Firstly, I read that some digital marketing agencies are using metrics such as 'ad to screen ratio', or 'total time ad stayed visible on the screen' to evaluate performance of their online campaigns. Do you think such methods can be integrated into a non-clicks study? Perhaps they would eliminate the logistical difficulties associated with more complicated methods such as tracking eye movements.

Secondly, I wonder how click-bait content (content that deliberately aims to lure people in by misleading) would interact with your study. Would be interesting to see if click-baits actually help content creators get more views, likes, etc. or whether they are detrimental in the long term.

Looking forward to your presentation!

[Qiuyu-Li]

Thank you for sharing your research! I find the eye-tracking method employed in your study very interesting. My only concern is about the generalizability. In the research, you observed the participants’ non-clicking behavior on Facebook pages on computers and reached impressive conclusions, but what about news websites or Amazon pages? What about the case of mobile devices? I believe they are all interesting topics, and I’m looking forward to seeing the heterogeneity in people’s non-clicking behavior between different contents and devices.

[YanjieZhou]

Thanks very much for your presentation! I think to investigate the non-click behaviors and the pattern of them is definitely meaningful and can even apply to other areas like advertising. What do you think about the prospect of scaling up this research and apply the conclusions to a wider area that is closer to practical application?

[qishenfu1]

This is a very interesting topic. Thinking of myself as an example, when I just view something on social media without clicking it, I sometimes also experience intense psychological activity, even stronger when I am a "clicker". Sometimes when I do no click on some content, I try to hide that I am interested in this content. However, I agree with Qiuyu that there might exist significant heterogeneity in people's non-clicking behavior.

[bazirou]

Thanks a lot for your presentation! This is very interesting research. How can we apply this research methodology to other disciplines in sociology? Thanks!

[ghost]

Do you think participants could have behaved differently because they were being watched?

[YijingZhang-98]

Thanks for sharing such an excellent paper! Well-designed experiments and well-round analysis of the data provide us with impressive results. The eye-tracking is very interesting, but it reminds me that when I myself was nervous, something goes differently with other moments, like my Adrenaline and the direction of the eyes. So would it possible that the participants' eye-tracking records may also be affected if they were monitored?

[Yaweili19]

Thank you for sharing your research! The non-click behavior on social networks does sound like a very innovative and often overlooked research topic. I am not very sure how you combined the interview data with the collected non-clickable browsing traces. I hope you can explain more. In addition, I also think that data collection in an experimental environment may not be so convincing, especially when considering the Hawthorne effect.

[RuoyunTan]

Thanks for sharing your research with us. Will the results differ when people are using different devices? Like browsing on the webpage or using the Facebook app.

[MegicLF]

Thank you for sharing such interesting research. Because of the recommendation system, users would typically be exposed to content they are interested in. So the click and viewing patterns may be impacted by the algorithm of Facebook. But for new users, they may not establish such a pattern for Facebook to catch. I wonder in this circumstance, how clicking and viewing patterns may change.

[robertorg]

Thanks for sharing this paper. It was really enjoyable to read it. I have one question related to user of facebook as a"conversation starter". According to the typology you provide, that behavior would not be considered as engaged clicker, but it anyway shows probably helps for social connectedness so I was wondering if it would be better to include people that use fb to start conversations as engaged clickers.

[harryx113]

Thank you so much for sharing! I wonder if the nature of the social network that a person is in would influence their decison on clicking/non-clicking?

[luckycindyyx]

Thank you for your interesting sharing. Since I am often troubled by these kind of non-clicking behaviors , I am very concerned about the generalizability of of your research, that is, when we extend the research process or conclusions to short-video app (e.g. Tik Tok), online shopping website (e.g. Amazon) and even social platforms in other countries, will there be any significant difference? Thank you!

[xxicheng]

Thanks for sharing. I am interested in how to get "non-click" behavior from digital records. What's your plan to scale up this research?

[rkcatipon]

Thank you for your research and I look forward to your presentation! I was struck with this line from your paper, "... participants saw clicks as shaping the composition of their Newsfeed and thus selectively non-clicked as a strategy to influence future feed content." I am curious about this computer-human effect, and how a long term interaction with an algorithm has made the user cognizant of algorithmic behavior. While many are interested in human-in-the-loop machine learning duynamics, I am fascinated by this concrete example of humans modifying their behavior to accomodate an updating machine. What are you toughts on the long term implications of such a computer-human relationship?

[ddlee19]

Thanks for sharing your paper. Is it possible that our clicking behavior differs based on the online environment (e.g. social media site, online blog, GitHub)?

[shenyc16]

Thank you for sharing this interesting research with us. I find the combination of eye-tracking session, interviews and online survey very innovative as well as comprehensive. I have a quick question related to your empirical analysis. As far as I am concerned, algorithms of social platform, users' mood and some other factors may also affect the relationship between click and view. I am wondering how you can add these contents to the research.

[alevi98]

This is such a fascinating topic to me, as someone interested in digital interfaces. One question I had methodologically was, did you account for heterogeneity with regards to age? I see you accounted for race and gender as variables in the Regression Output for RQ2a, but I would be interested in knowing if there are meaningful differences in view/click behavior along an age spectrum.

Additionally, do you know of any literature with a similar question, but on different interfaces? Do you think there are subcultures within a given social media interface that influence viewing/clicking behavior? Even within the Facebook interface, clicking on a status vs. an advertisement is such a different action. Do you think the various features of other interfaces (Instagram, Twitter, etc.) would impact your findings?

[adarshmathew]

Thank you for this fun paper addressing one of the big critiques of trace data. I just want to give a shout-out to three interesting questions on here: @nwrim's on scalability, @mikepackard415's on the ineffable concept of ad impressions, and @MkramerPsych's observations on influencers and unequal creators.

My question is a little more meta: Your study is one of the few examples I've come across where you use Facebook data without relying on the company to provide you access. It makes your study, IMO, richer and more tangible to me. Do you worry about the validity of your results (small sample sizes compared to FB's logs), their generalization (whether these patterns persist for other age groups, for example), and their relevance (the fear/possibility that FB engineers and PMs already know these results, but hold it back as it is private research)? As an independent researcher studying our interaction with platforms, do you have thoughts on how experimentation and collection strategies can be independent of the platform's arbitrary benevolence? This obviously ties to a lot of the questions on here about 'scaling up' this research, albeit obliquely.

(Related: Facebook filing a Cease & Desist against NYU researchers studying political ads through voluntary browser plugins)

[bjcliang-uchi]

Interesting research. I am wondering how much the "unexpectable" level of the content influences the clicking and eye moving behavior. For example, if my friend just posts something complaining about life stress, I won't really look at it carefully. But if someone tries to discuss/forward a complicated thought, I would read more carefully. This seems nothing to do with this person's "social capital." Are you planning to quantify the complexity of news feeds?

[Panyw97]

Thank you for sharing! Could you talk about your approach to track the non-click behavior in more detail?

[fyzh-git]

A very enlightening paper and intriguing topic! I learn a lot from this paper. Thank you!

• Think in opposite in terms of generating a research idea: in addition to the story behind the clicking behavior, how about 'non-click behavior'. Thinking from another perspective may contributes to some brand new questions and leads to a few 'unexplored' mechanisms.
• Use complementary data sets to reveal some potentially ignored but actually happened behavior of individuals, which helps to uncover the truth of behavior by constructing a comprehensive sight and a full picture of individuals' actual behavior, thus reducing the implicit bias due to dataset limitations i.e. using interviews to incorporate the 'missing' data from other channels/platforms. Thank you again for these enlightening points!

[97seshu]

Thank you for sharing! I wonder whether people's non-clicking behavior would vary depending on the format, visualization, and design of the platform?

[xzmerry]

Thanks for introducing behaviors that are not explicitly visible otherwise! I have a question about your research setting.

Why you let participants browsed their own Facebook News Feeds during the experiments? Considering the heterogeneity of the Facebook News Feeds among different participants, whether it would be better to record their eye-tracking when participants are reading the same standardized page that is carefully designed by you?

[chun-hu]

Thanks for sharing! People who show non-click behaviors in some situations might participate actively in other events. What can we get out of this type of data?

[Yiqing-Zh]

Thank you for the presentation. Since viewing time does not differ so much between clicker and non-clicker, I am wondering whether there exist some other costs for clicking, such as the cost of switching the web page. Is it possible to identify such kind of cost for clicking?

[timqzhang]

Thank you for your paper ! I also have the similar question regarding the scaling up process, and also the difference between clicker and non-clicker behavior, is there any intuitions?

[Jasmine97Huang]

Thank you for this interesting paper. My question for you is related to the implementation of the eye tracking study design. What type of user interface did the participants use to log in and view their Facebook feeds? Based on my personal experiences with social media, I am more likely to engage on the platform when using it on my phone than on my laptop. Assuming the participants used a web browser on lab computers to use Facebook, do you think the results will be different if participants are view feed from mobile UI?

[cytwill]

Thanks for this interesting HCI paper. The classification of these those clickers and lurkers really made me feel curious. Many people have mentioned the issue of scaling up, which I also shared. As you have mentioned that those engaged clickers are vulnerable to negative emotions, do you have any suggestions for web-site designers to alleviate such impact from social comparison? Besides, there are several predictors of clicking behavior proposed, like heterogeneity of the networks and liking motivations. Are there any interactions between these predictors, and I also wonder if the inference could be inverse. For example, from the analysis of the clicking behavior of a user to know his network property or some personality?

[YaoYao121]

Thanks for sharing with us this paper. I am very curious about how to avoid the behavior bias when the participants are being observing. Will they behave differently in experients since they know they are in experiments? Thanks!

[wanxii]

It's fascinating to see how you ingeniously link different concepts and results extracted from various literatures to form an innovative interacting-viewing model. In this paper, you choose 'social comparison' and 'social connectness' as two main factors influencing well-being. At first, I wondered why you didn't go further in this direction in the paper, but you've also mentioned that there could be lots of future work surrounding this topic. I totally agree with you, so maybe I'll leave my question to your future work. And it'll be great to see further work using more standardized methods to measure well-being and including more potential factors that might impact our well-being into analysis. Good luck with your trip to cracking the mystery of our virtual well-being by observing people's click-nonclick behaviorsy!!!

[caibengbu]

Thanks a lot for your presentation! This is very interesting research. How can we apply this research methodology to other disciplines in sociology? Thanks!

[chuqingzhao]

Thank you for sharing such interesting paper! I am interested in eye-tracking methods.

• I am wondering the generalizability of your interface design during the experiment. As you have mentioned participants read the Facebook post, I am wondering why not using other interface or design an interface to control some variables?

• Another question might be broad, but I am curious what is the implementation of eye-tracking methods in other discipline (like Linguistics, Sociology or Economics)?

Thank you again!

[aolajide]

To what degree do you think the non-click varies with external, offline factors? Or rather, do you think that they have ever, do, or will ever weigh more heavily than online factors?

[lyl010]

Thank you for coming, Prof. Ellison. You discussed the original dichotomous-'passive and active user' is problematic because the clicking and viewing is not linearly relevant to each other. And I really appreciate this discussion because I can imagine the attention of later discussions on social media could then be drawn onto the other two categories of people in your conceptualization. You also mentioned that the social network can be relevant to the behaviors of users, and it is relevant to the position they are in this social network. Do you think social media would create a social capital for people seated at the center of heterogeneous networks because he/she kind of share information from different groups? Besides, I am curious about if the dynamics of social networks help us to understand people's clicking behaviors? Thank you!

[zixu12]

Thanks for sharing with us! I am particularly interested in the use of eye-tracking device mentioned in your study, which can be only used under the lab-like experiments. Do you think this will cause research bias? As the participants clearly realize they are under study, they may act differently from how they click in real life.

[Rui-echo-Pan]

Thanks for sharing! Could you share more about tackling problems in terms of online experiments?

[j2401]

I’m interested in a specific question: The lurkers may have concerns regarding privacy. If the participants are using a platform on which the browsing data is just recorded as counts but not revealing names of browsers, will you modify the typology in the research? Would it be possible for this method to provide evidence for/against your proposal? Thank you for presenting this innovative approach!

[ziwnchen]

Thanks for the presentation! I find the paper particularly interesting in explaining the non-click behaviors, especially the intentional avoidance of the Facebook feed algorithm. It is a widely-discussed topic today that platforms portrait users by analyzing their behaviors--not just likes, but also clicking. You explained that the users mainly avoid clicking because they don't want to see a similar content future. But could it go even further? Maybe users are deliberately avoid being analyzed and portrait in general, as their clicking record will not only decide their future feed, but also generally what they are tagged--what they like, what political party they belong to, and what they may post themselves. In other words, how users' privacy concern accounts for non-clicking behavior?

[ttsujikawa]

Thank you for sharing your really impressive ideas. I really liked a part where you generalize users' behaviors, narrowing down to their psychological thinking processes that might explain why they did not click or click. Speaking to the generalization of social media users' behaviors, I wonder if the specific features of Facebook make users make decisions or psychological explanations to users' behaviors can be applied to other social media platforms. In my opinion, the limitation of this research is that this only explains the Facebook users' behaviors. Thus, my question is that how could we apply this research to other social media platforms and how could we eliminate the "Facebook-specific factors" to make this research applicable to other platforms.