Dynamic voting interface in social media: Does it affect individual votes?

Abstract

The rise in popularity of social media along with new web technologies has presented designers and developers with tremendous new interface opportunities for evaluating user-generated content. One of these new interface designs found in social media today, is the dynamic voting interface; voting results are public from the initiation of an evaluation procedure and are constantly being updated. However, it is currently unclear on whether these interfaces affect the outcome of a voting process and to what degree. This study employed a mixed methods survey as an attempt to try and answer these questions and provide exploratory evidence for the effects of dynamic voting interfaces on social media communities. Findings coming from this study are able to provide support for the "no effect" hypothesis. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.