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This study explores the key platform affordances that online social platform providers need to offer digital creators to strengthen the creator ecosystem, one of the leading accelerators for platform growth. Specifically, it aims to investigate how these affordances make the dynamic combinations for high platform quality across diverse platform types and demographic characteristics of digital creators.

This study adopts a multi-method approach. Drawing upon the affordance theory, Study 1 aims to identify the key affordances of online social platforms based on relevant literature and the qualitative interview data collected from 22 digital creators, thereby constructing a conceptual framework of key platform affordances for digital creators. Building on the findings of Study 1, Study 2 explores the dynamic combinations of these platform affordances that contribute to platform quality using a configurational approach. Data from online surveys of 185 digital creators were analyzed using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA).

The results of Study 1 identified key online social platform affordances for digital creators, including Storytelling, Socialization, Design, Development, Promotion, and Protection affordance. Study 2 showed that the combinations of these platform affordances for digital creators are diverse according to the types of platforms, creators’ gender, and their professionality.

Like many studies, this research also has several limitations. One limitation of the research is the potential constraint of the extent of how well the data samples represent the group of creators who are actively producing digital content. Despite the addition of screening questions and meticulous data filtering, it is possible that we did not secure sufficient data from creators who are actively engaged in creative activities. In future research, it is worth contemplating the acquisition of data from actual groups of creators, such as creator communities. Future researchers anticipate obtaining more in-depth and accurate data by directly involving and collaborating with creators.

This study highlights the need for online social platforms to enhance features for storytelling, socializing, design, development, promotion, and protection, fostering a robust digital creator ecosystem. It emphasizes clear communication of these affordances, ensuring creators can effectively utilize them. Importantly, platforms should adapt these features to accommodate diverse creator profiles, considering differences in gender and expertise levels, especially in emerging spaces like the Metaverse. This approach ensures an equitable and enriching experience for all users and creators, underlining the importance of dynamic interaction and inclusivity in platform development and creator support strategies.

This study underscores the social implications of evolving digital creator ecosystems on online platforms. Identifying six key affordances essential for digital creators highlights the need for platforms to enhance storytelling, socializing, design, development, promotion, and product protection. Crucially, it emphasizes inclusivity, urging platforms to consider diverse creator profiles, including gender and expertise differences, particularly in transitioning from traditional social media to the Metaverse. This approach nurtures a more robust creator ecosystem and fosters an equitable and enriching experience for all users. It signals a shift towards more dynamic, adaptive online environments catering to diverse creators and audiences.

For academics, this study builds the conceptual framework of online social platform affordances for digital creators. Using the configurational approach, this study identified various interdependent relationships among the affordances, which are nuanced by specific contexts, and suggested novel insights for future studies. For practices, the findings specified by creators and platform types are expected to guide platform providers in developing strategies to support digital creators and contribute to platform growth.

This study examines how users' multidimensional representational fidelity factors affect sociability and cyberself engagement in the Metaverse platform; that is, how they interact with newly defined self-images as their personas in the environments. It investigates how representational fidelity serves platform users to perform social roles and increase their sociability by establishing a new cyberself, thus influencing continuous platform use.

This study surveyed 314 users of the Metaverse platform Horizon, where users can create a virtual agent avatar, meet people in the same online environment in real time, and interact with a sense of three-dimensional immersion. Data were analyzed using partial least squares regression models.

User socialization significantly influenced the intention to use the Metaverse platform. Representational fidelity was a crucial variable for sociability, and activity representational fidelity was the most influential aspect among the four other elements. Platforms should consider how to enable users to create and use activities that faithfully represent their personas.

The novelty of this study is that it introduces representational fidelity based on representation theory into the context of virtual persona in the Metaverse platform. This study extended representational fidelity to the socialization perspective by utilizing the integrated model of user satisfaction and the technology acceptance model. Through the results, this study emphasized that users' sociability significantly influences their intention to use the Metaverse platform. Finally, this study provides a feasible guideline on how practitioners could design and strengthen their platforms so that users can represent their cyberselves faithfully.

Social networking services (SNSs) have become deeply ingrained into our daily life. However, it has often been reported that users experience negative feelings regarding SNS usage. This phenomenon presents challenges for SNS providers in retaining or increasing their customer base. This study focuses on SNS fatigue, a negative psychological state that can lead to discontinuance intention among SNS users. This study proposes two distinctive SNS-specific contexts and investigates how they alleviate the negative effect of SNS fatigue on user behavior.

Drawing upon the context-specific theorization perspective, a model involving moderation effects of the SNS-specific contexts on the relationship between user's SNS fatigue and discontinuance intention was proposed. The model was tested using survey data of active SNS users.

The results indicate that SNS fatigue leads to user discontinuance intention. However, the SNS-specific contexts, such as social interaction context and platform service context, negatively moderate the relationship between SNS fatigue and user discontinuance intention.

The findings of this study are expected to help SNS providers develop strategies to improve their services for effective user retention.