Fighting for My Idol: The Effect of a Community Leaderboard on User Content Generation
Liqiang Huang, Wei Miao, Liangfei Qiu, Chuang Tang, Zhonggen Wei
1 Abstract
User-generated content (UGC) platforms are increasingly incorporating community features to enhance user engagement, but understanding how to effectively motivate users to generate more content of higher quality within these communities remains a challenging task for managers. This study examines how introducing a gamified leaderboard that ranks user communities impacts users’ content creation behavior. We collaborate with a leading social media platform in Asia that offers, in addition to its core microblogging function, a unique feature called a “community” that provides a dedicated space for engaging around shared interests. We leverage a unique natural experiment in which the platform introduced a public leaderboard into its superstar communities for a subset of users, enabling these users to earn points by generating content and use these to compete on the leaderboard. Utilizing a difference-in-differences research design, we find that the introduction of the community leaderboard led to a significant increase in the volume of content creation among treatment group users compared to those in the control group. A decomposition by content type further reveals that the increase in volume was primarily driven by comments rather than original posts. Although the leaderboard effectively motivated users to generate more content, it also led to a general decrease in the content quality of comments, while the quality of original posts remained unchanged. These findings suggest that a community leaderboard can be a double-edged sword for motivating content generation. We then apply the causal forest method to investigate how individual treatment effects vary with user characteristics, and we find that the gamified leaderboard was more effective for younger female users who were new to the platform and for those who had been more active prior to its introduction. We discuss both the theoretical and the practical implications of our findings for UGC platforms.