Treffer: Lost in the Crowd: How Group Size and Content Moderation Shape User Engagement in Live Streaming.

Live streaming platforms such as Twitch and YouTube Live now play a central role in digital engagement, offering real-time interaction that grows increasingly complex with larger audiences. Our study leverages the exogenous viewer influx from Twitch's Raid function to examine how increases in group size affect user engagement. Analyzing chat histories from more than 7,000 playbacks using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that although attracting more viewers, larger group sizes also lead to reduced engagement among existing participants. This decline is linked to increased topic incoherence and heightened emotional volatility—or comment polarity—in live chats. Importantly, our results highlight that targeted moderation strategies can mitigate these negative effects. Bot moderators are particularly effective in maintaining coherence during large-scale raids, whereas human moderators better manage emotional surges when the incoming group is smaller. These findings reveal a congestion effect in synchronous digital environments and offer clear practice- and policy-oriented implications: Online synchronous platforms should consider the scalability of viewers and commenters and use flexible moderation strategies to sustain user engagement and foster healthier, more constructive real-time interactions. Despite the focus of the digital content literature on asynchronous platforms (e.g., Reddit, Wikipedia, Yelp), synchronous content platforms like live streaming (e.g., Twitch, Youtube Live) have become increasingly popular for enabling real-time user engagement at scale. These platforms involve engaging a sizable user base, facilitating their interactions within a contemporaneous environment. As group size increases, real-time interactivity scales rapidly, making the engagement interface fast-paced and erratic. Consequently, live-streaming channels often use moderators to address the challenge. Although the existing literature finds that the audience's group size has a positive effect on user engagement on asynchronous platforms, how group size affects synchronous interactions, particularly with the presence of bot and human moderators, is unclear. In this work, we leverage exogenous increases in live streaming viewers (from the Raid function in Twitch) to empirically examine the impact of group size on commenters' engagement in real time. Furthermore, we delve into the role of moderators and their influence on this nuanced dynamic. Leveraging difference-in-differences as the econometric identification strategy, we analyze panel data constructed with chat histories of 7,074 playbacks on Twitch. The results suggest that (a) existing commenters tend to engage less after the increases in group size; (b) the negative engagement effect is the product of mediation effects by way of the increased topic incoherence and emotional polarity of comment (herein referred to as "comment polarity") that decreases engagement; and (c) live streaming channels adopting bot or human moderators can better curb the negative effect, such that bot moderators are effective in decreasing the escalation of incoherence, particularly when the incoming Raider group is large, although human moderators better limit surges in comment polarity, particularly when the incoming Raider group is small. The findings in this paper indicate a congestion effect, a negative externality of increasing group size on commenter engagement in synchronous content platforms, further revealing a nuanced relationship among group size, topic incoherence, comment polarity, and user engagement. Our research further suggests the beneficial role of content moderators, which provides implications for online platform operators and policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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