Understanding Members' Active Participation In The Blockchain-based Communities:An Empirical Study On Steemit

The emergence and development of blockchain technology has driven the paradigm shift of the organizational structure,and it enables a new type of organizational form——the decentralized autonomous organizations.Steemit is the first content community based on blockchain.Traditional centralized content platforms make use of members' traffic and value to generate revenue,while Steemit uses a cryptocurrency-based economic incentive mechanism to provide a fair calculation system that identifies every member's contribution,thereby encouraging people to actively participate community.However,at present,there are few empirical studies on the blockchain-based content community.Therefore,by exploring the antecedents of users' active participation in the blockchain content community,this study can not only enrich the research content on this subject,but also give advice for the operation of content platforms.In this study,we use active participation as the dependent variable and take the user's two roles as the starting point.Based on social capital theory and psychological ownership theory,we propose that users' social capital and share capital can positively influence users' active participation behavior.This study also proposes that the social feedback and economic feedback received by users moderate the impact of social capital and share capital on active participation.In this paper,we adopt the method of econometrics to build a two-way fixed effect negative binomial model.We randomly collected the panel data of 80,000 users in the Steemit community for 3 months.After cleaning,the activity records of 25,466 users are used as the research data set.We use the Stata data analysis tool to verify the model hypothesis.The research results show that in the blockchain-based content community,users' social capital,share capital,social feedback and economic feedback positively affect users' active participation behavior.At the same time,economic feedback positively moderates the positive impact of social capital and share capital on active participation behavior,social feedback positively moderates the positive impact of relational capital and cognitive capital on active participation behavior,and negatively moderates the positive impact of structural capital and share capital on active participation behavior.This research has several innovative points.Through a new perspective,we explore the impact of social capital and share capital on active participation,which effectively enriches the research on users' active participation in decentralized autonomous communities.This paper also introduces psychological ownership to explain the internal mechanism of the effect of share capital,which provides a reference for the research of psychological ownership in the field of information systems.Finally,this study also provides some practical guidance for community operators to guide users to actively participate in the community.