Sharing the Fun? How Social Information Affects Viewers’ Video Enjoyment and Video Evaluations

Abstract

Online video platforms often present videos together with social information in the form of user comments and likes. This study tested two hypotheses about how this merger of mass and interpersonal communication on online video platforms shapes viewers’ evaluations and enjoyment of online videos. Whereas the judgement effect hypothesis states that social information alters viewers’ video evaluations, the processing effect hypothesis poses that it influences viewers’ enjoyment while they are watching videos. Using real-time response measures, this experiment pitted both hypotheses against each other. The results indicate that if viewers are exposed to social information before watching a video, a processing effect emerges on their enjoyment as they are watching. If viewers are exposed to social information after watching a video, a judgement effect on their retrospective video enjoyment occurs but not on their video evaluations. These new insights advance our understanding of how social information affects video viewers.

Cutting Through the Comment Chaos: A Supervised Machine Learning Approach to Identifying Relevant YouTube Comments

“…Particularly YouTube is characterized by its large number of public comments, and active user engagement in the comment section (Khan, 2017). YouTube comments have been previously studied to understand attitudes and opinions of users (Alhujaili & Yafooz, 2021), to examine user discourse about specific topics (e.g., Schneider, 2016), or to understand the influence of these comments on users (e.g., Möller et al, 2021; Walther et al, 2010). When conducting studies on user comments, it is indispensable to first identify and eliminate irrelevant comments as these might seriously bias study results.…”

“…Although the usage of computational methods, and machine learning in particular, is increasing within the field of social sciences in general, it is not often used by scholars taking a media psychological perspective to study YouTube comments. This is striking as entertainment scholars studying the effects that YouTube comments may have on video viewers base their work on the assumption that the comments that video viewers see are actually relevant (e.g., Möller et al, 2021; Walther et al, 2010). Relying on SML, we demonstrate how such models can help filter relevant user comments on YouTube before proceeding with classifications that allow us to predict the underlying meaning of comments.…”

“…A specific focus within this research is the study of online user comments written on social media and on YouTube in particular. It has been shown, for example, that people’s attitudes towards and experiences of videos depend on the comments that accompany these videos (e.g., Hsueh et al, 2015; Möller et al, 2021; Shi et al, 2014; Waddell & Sundar, 2017; Walther et al, 2010; Ziegele et al, 2018). Other studies focused on how viewers use comments to converse about the content that they are watching (e.g., Dubovi & Tabak, 2020; Poché et al, 2017; Song et al, 2015).…”