Designing The Interplay Between Anonymity And Publicity For Online Social Support

Online social platforms have been used for people to seek social support. Unlike previous studies that singularly focused on either identity anonymity or content publicity vs. privacy, we conducted a pilot study focusing on understanding the effects of interplay between anonymity and publicity towards social support provision behaviors, by prototyping interfaces in a social application called Met. The result shows participants' discrepant practices given different combinations of anonymity and publicity, with their contrasting preferences for anonymity and publicity when they took different perspectives as disclosers vs. responders, offering us design implications and insights for future work.