Content area
Social connectedness is fundamental to individual development, well-being, and self-growth. Modern social technologies provide powerful means to foster human connections, enabling people to share their everyday experiences and activities to maintain relationships and achieve various social well-being outcomes – from receiving desired support to sustaining motivation through accountability and managing self-presentation. However, the success of achieving these sharing goals heavily depends on effective communication, which is intrinsically tied to how well users adapt their sharing practices to fit with the platform's characteristics and design. I argue that when the sharing features help align with people’s sharing practices for sharing activity on a social media platform the sharer better receives desired sharing outcomes.
To focus on the impact of platform design on the sharing outcomes, I first investigate how the content diversity of a social media platform impacts the sharing outcomes by comparing the responses received and the effect of using the editing feature. I then examine the effect of platform design on the sharing practices people adopted by examining activity sharing on a short-form video platform by conducting a content analysis study. Finally, building upon findings on how platform design influences the activity-sharing experience, I conduct an evaluative study of SnapPI, a tool that supports creating stickers incorporating personal activity-tracking data to be shared on an ephemeral social media platform to examine how the design of a sharing support tool could lead to desired sharing outcomes. Together, I demonstrate how platform design fundamentally influences sharing experiences and how alignment with platform-encouraged practices leads to positive outcomes matching users' activity sharing goals. My dissertation advances our understanding of socio-technical design interventions that enhance social well-being through everyday activity sharing, providing foundational research for creating social technologies that intrinsically improve well-being and enrich people's lives.