Prompt-Rich CMC on YouTube: To What or to Whom Do Comments Respond?

Abstract

Participants in textual CMC must identify to whom or what a message responds in order to establish conversational coherence. Media sharing sites provide rich prompts that make available multiple, diverse, potential addressees. We conducted an exploratory content analysis of addressee types and how they relate to the content of messages in three YouTube comment threads related to the COVID-19 pandemic, applying addressee and topic coding schemes inspired by [6]'s YouTube participation framework. Some addressee types and content types were mentioned significantly more frequently than others, although there was variation across threads. Also, certain kinds of topics were addressed more with certain addressees, and different topics were addressed in replies than in comments. Thus, the interaction between addressee and message content should be considered in analyses of conversational coherence on YouTube and other rich-prompt CMC platforms. third type is user-initiated indentation, e.g., on Wikipedia Talk pages; this would be considered a user-generated variant of the 'message' relation in the present study.

Sharing emotion while spectating video game play: Exploring Twitch users' emotional change after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic

“…In their study, Sjöblom et al (2017) carried out a survey responded to by 1091 Twitch users and pinpointed that content type is a critical factor affecting Twitch users' motivation over other factors. Recently, Herring and Chae (2021) explore YouTube users' comments during the COVID-19 lockdown, and their results display that the linguistic patterns in users' comments significantly vary by content type. The other possible control variable is channel (streamer) on Twitch.…”