What Makes Creators Engage with Online Critiques? Understanding the Role of Artifacts’ Creation Stage, Characteristics of Community Comments, and their Interactions

Abstract

Online critique communities (OCCs) provide a convenient space for creators to solicit feedback on their artifacts and improve skills. Creators’ behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement with comments on their works contribute to their skill development. However, what kinds of critique creators feel engaging may change with the creation stage of their shared artifacts. In this paper, we first model three dimensions of engagement expressed in creators’ replies to peer comments. Then we quantitatively examine how their engagement is affected by artifacts’ stage and feedback characteristics via regression analysis. Results show that creators sharing works-in-progress tend to exhibit lower behavioral and emotional engagement, but higher cognitive engagement than those sharing complete works. The increase in the valence of the feedback is associated with a stronger increase in behavior engagement for seekers sharing complete works than works-in-progress. Finally, we discuss how our insights could benefit OCCs and other online help-seeking platforms.