The Influence Of "Agreeing Feedback" On User Content Generation In Online Investment Communities

With the advent of Web2.0 era and the popularity of diversified multimedia terminals,user initiative and autonomy are gradually improved,and various usergenerated content(hereafter UGC)communities are more and more favored by the majority of netizens.Online investment community(hereafter OIC)is a special UGC knowledge sharing community,and investors increasingly rely on investment advice in OICs.From the perspective of analysts in OIC,analysts are willing to share their investment analysis and investment suggestions out of certain psychological encouragement and satisfaction.From the perspective of readers,professional information intermediaries can mine more internal information and conduct professional interpretation.At the same time,some analysts can obtain certain internal information to reduce information uncertainty Symmetrical risk makes investors more dependent on analysts' analysis and suggestions in online investment communityThis study analyzes the influence of the “likes” function on the characteristics of user generated content in OICs.Based on the data collected from Seeking Alpha,we perform a series of analyses from the perspectives of authors and readers.The user generated content in Seeking Alpha is mainly composed of investment analysis written by authors and comments written by readers.Besides the traditional comment function,the feedback has added the identification feedback — “like” function in 2018.This study discusses the change of the new identity feedback from the perspective of the author and the reader.At the author-level,we find that authors expound the logic of the articles more seriously,increase the proportion of negative words,and reduce the frequency of writing articles.The reader-level analysis shows that “likes” and“comments” are complementary to each other,and readers do not reduce their“comments” after the launch of the “likes” function.In general,the launch of the new function affects the content generated by both authors and readers.Our study can enrich the research on UGC especially in the OIC context,and provide suggestions for OIC managers to motivate users to make feedback and contribution in such communities.