Paper Type
Short
Description
Live stream consumption, spanning very diverse topics from video games to real-life streams, live coding, and political discussions, has surged in popularity across various demographics. Besides making it possible to consume content, platforms such as Twitch also enable consumers to financially support streamers and their streams in various ways, for example through monthly subscriptions, virtual currencies like Twitch Bits or gifted subscriptions to other users. This study conceptualizes each live stream chat as a unique micro community and focuses on the latter form of financial support. We build a bridge between chat and financial support data of more than 100,000 Twitch live streams and generosity through gifted subscriptions to explore why some streams seem to foster generosity more than others. Ultimately, this study sheds light on the design of online social network features that promote the actualization of the affordance of generosity within online communities.
Recommended Citation
Schwehm, Kevin; Schwehm, Steven; Sandhyaduhita, Puspa; Kumar, Avant; Das, Sudip; Choi, Ben; and Miranda, Shaila, "Play it Forward – Transforming Consumption into Generosity" (2023). ICIS 2023 Proceedings. 1.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2023/paperthon/paperthon/1
Play it Forward – Transforming Consumption into Generosity
Live stream consumption, spanning very diverse topics from video games to real-life streams, live coding, and political discussions, has surged in popularity across various demographics. Besides making it possible to consume content, platforms such as Twitch also enable consumers to financially support streamers and their streams in various ways, for example through monthly subscriptions, virtual currencies like Twitch Bits or gifted subscriptions to other users. This study conceptualizes each live stream chat as a unique micro community and focuses on the latter form of financial support. We build a bridge between chat and financial support data of more than 100,000 Twitch live streams and generosity through gifted subscriptions to explore why some streams seem to foster generosity more than others. Ultimately, this study sheds light on the design of online social network features that promote the actualization of the affordance of generosity within online communities.
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