To Share or Not Share? Public Sharing Decisions on Snapchat
This article summarizes a research paper authored by Hana Habib (Carnegie Mellon University), Neil Shah (Snap Inc.), and Rajan Vaish (Snap Inc.). This paper will be presented at CHI 2019, a conference of Human-Computer Interaction, on Wednesday, 8th May 2019 at 14:00 BST during the session on Digital Consumption.
Summary
Social platforms are powered by content shared by their users. Therefore, it is critical to understand why people choose to share (or not share) their experiences, and how context, such as where they are and what they are doing, plays a role. We conducted a survey to explore public sharing on Snapchat, a popular photo and video messaging application with millions of daily active users. What we found was that there are aspects of context that are considered more private, and in which people are less comfortable with public sharing. Additionally, we observed that most commonly motivations for publicly sharing content are intrinsic to the person sharing, while considerations are related to the audience and content of the photo or video being shared.
Background
On Snapchat, users can share short-lived photos and videos, called Snaps, with their friends through My Story and the rest of the world through Our Story. Our Story is a relatively new Snapchat feature with little previous research on how and why people use it to publicly share their Snaps. Our study focused on two research questions related to these features:
(1) What role does context play in sharing decisions?
(2) What are users’ motivations and considerations when publicly sharing their content?
We analyzed responses to a survey from 1,515 Snapchat users in the United States. In our survey, we asked participants about the context of the Snaps they last shared to My Story and Our Story. Specifically, we included questions about four “primary context types” defined by Dey and Abowd: identity, activity, location, and time. In the example Snap below, you can see how these four attributes can be used to describe context. With these responses, we compared the contexts of private and public Snaps and learned more about the motivations and considerations that play into public sharing decisions. We also asked participants to think about how comfortable they would be sharing Snaps publicly to Our Story in different variations of context.
Findings
We found that each factor of context played a role in public sharing on Snapchat. We also observed themes in the reasons participants chose to share or not share to Our Story in the past. These results are summarized in the table below.
What We Learned
Content sharing platforms, beyond Snapchat, can use our findings related to context to support user motivations for public sharing and address different user considerations. For example, product designers can use contextual factors, like location and time, to respect users’ privacy and take into account concerns related to audience and content. Our findings show that as the landscape of content sharing continues to change, it is important to continuously assess people’s motivations and considerations in public sharing.
For more details about this work, read the full paper accepted at CHI 2019. Full citation:
Hana Habib, Neil Shah, and Rajan Vaish. 2019. Impact of Contextual Factors on Snapchat Public Sharing. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019), May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland UK. ACM, New York, NY, USA.
