Exploring Activity-Sharing Response Differences Between Broad-Purpose and Dedicated Online Social Platforms

People often leverage multiple platforms to share activities they undertake in their lives, from music listening to eating. Broad-purpose platforms, which people use to share a wide variety of activities with a diverse audience, and dedicated platforms, which often focus on tracking and sharing a specific activity with connections with similar interests, both help individuals seeking social benefits from sharing their activity. Researchers designing systems for activity sharing have often reflected on whether to support sharing on dedicated or broad-purpose platforms, suggesting a need to better understand their relative utility. We collected and compared the responses received between 700,000 pairs of activity-sharing posts on four sets of broad-purpose and dedicated platforms across two domains: physical activity (Strava, MapMyRun) and creativity (Dribbble, Behance). Results showed that dedicated platforms were more likely to receive responses (likes and comments), and comments were more likely to be encouraging and refer to specific qualities of the activities being shared. We reflect on the tradeoff between sheer audience volume and likelihood of response, and discuss how to design prompts and templates into sharing features which better align with the norms of respective platforms.