ABSTRACT

Incentivized blockchain-based online social media (BOSM), where creators and curators of popular content are paid in cryptocurrency, have recently emerged. Traditional social media ecosystems have experienced significant bot involvement in their platforms, which has often had a negative impact on both users and platforms. BOSM can provide additional direct financial incentives as motivation for both bots’ and human users’ engagement. Using the panel vector autoregression and regression discontinuity in time framework, we analyze two distinct data sets from Steemit, the largest and most popular BOSM, to study the impact of bot engagement on human users and the impact of changes in financial reward on user engagement. Interestingly, our findings demonstrate that while increased engagement by bots is positively associated with engagement by human users, the association between bot engagement and human user engagement decreases as the number of votes for a post increases. We also find that shifts in economic incentives significantly influence the behavior of both human users and bots. This research provides significant insights on how social media platforms can leverage economic incentives to influence user behavior and, more importantly, leverage bots’ activity to increase the engagement of their human users.

摘要

最近出现了基于区块链的激励型在线社交媒体（BOSM），流行内容的创作者和策展人以加密货币支付报酬。传统的社交媒体生态系统在其平台中经历了大量的机器人参与，这往往对用户和平台产生负面影响。BOSM 可以提供额外的直接经济激励，作为机器人和人类用户参与的动力。使用面板向量自回归和时间框架中的不连续性回归，我们分析了最大且最受欢迎的 BOSM Steemit 的两个不同数据集，以研究机器人参与度对人类用户的影响以及财务奖励变化对用户参与度的影响。有趣的是，我们的研究结果表明，虽然机器人参与度的增加与人类用户的参与度呈正相关，但机器人参与度和人类用户参与度之间的关联随着帖子投票数的增加而减少。我们还发现，经济激励措施的转变会显着影响人类用户和机器人的行为。这项研究提供了关于社交媒体平台如何利用经济激励来影响用户行为，更重要的是，利用机器人的活动来提高人类用户的参与度的重要见解。