How do users’ feedback influence creators’ contributions: an empirical study of an online music community

This paper examines creators' contributions and the incentive effects of users' feedback, including upvoting, sharing, commenting, following, viewing comments, and clicking on the creators' homepage. We build a negative binomial and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model using data from a Chinese music streaming company NetEase Cloud Music. Results show that creators' number of content contributions is positively affected by the number of users' commenting, viewing comments, sharing, and clicking on homepage behaviors. On the other hand, users' upvotes and sharing behaviors can significantly influence the quality of content published by creators. Moreover, we find that the intensity level of creators has moderate effects on such influence. These findings help the researchers better understand creators' behaviors and community managers to build user-generated content (UGC) communities.