Situated Anonymity: Impacts of Anonymity, Ephemerality, and Hyper-Locality on Social Media Ari Schlesinger, Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Christina A. Masden, Amy S. Bruckman, W. Keith Edwards, Rebecca E. Grinter School of Interactive Computing and GVU Center Atlanta, GA USA
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[email protected] ABSTRACT concerned with what causes users to care about and become Anonymity, ephemerality, and hyper-locality are an dedicated to a community, a crucial component of success. uncommon set of features in the design of online communities. However, these features were key to Yik Typically, commitment to an online community has been Yak's initial success and popularity. In an interview-based characterized as either bond-based commitment, meaning study, we found that these three features deeply affected the attachment to specific users within the community (like on identity of the community as a whole, the patterns of use, Facebook), or identity-based commitment, meaning and the ways users committed to this community. We attachment to a topic or characteristic—such as home-town conducted interviews with 18 Yik Yak users on an urban pride, surviving cancer, or anime fandom (like 4chan) [56]. American university campus and found that these three However, when a community deviates from established focal design features contributed to casual commitment, practices and thrives, it introduces a compelling opportunity transitory use, and emergent community identity. We to probe standard understanding. describe situated anonymity, which is the result of Yik Yak, a social media application that became the 9th anonymity, ephemerality, and hyper-locality coexisting as most downloaded app in the U.S.