Scholar's View | Jun-peng Guo: Beware of the Overuse Caused by Personalized Recommender of Digital Content Platform During the COVID-19

　　Match 18th

　　An epidemic prevention battle has started in China since the outbreak of COVID-19. To improve the epidemic prevention and control situation and accelerate the recovery of production and living order, China has adopted comprehensive and strict prevention and control measures. People have to stay at home and work, study and entertain through the Internet. During this period, there is no doubt that the hottest is the digital content platform. The data shows that during the COVID-19, the daily active users of digital content platforms with the personalized recommender as the main feature represented by Tik Tok and Mango IV has grown rapidly.

　　However, excessive use of digital content platforms will also bring many disadvantages, such as addiction. Many students always spend a lot of time on the digital content platform unconsciously at home and even delay the learning tasks. The personalized recommender of the digital content platform will allow users only to see their favorite areas, and lose the opportunity to explore other fields. Over time, it may even hinder the development of way of thinking. Therefore, we need to be vigilant about the excessive use of digital content platforms.

　　Digital content platform

　　Digital content platform refers to a platform that provides users with digital content products through the Internet. These digital content products mainly include news, music, and video.

　　The personalized recommender system

　　Recommender system was first proposed by Resnick and Varian as an information filtering technology in the Internet era, which can predict the information needs of users and effectively solve the problem of information overload. For online platforms, the recommender system can maintain the user's adhesion, high-quality information push will make users rely on the system, improve the loyalty of information users and prevent the loss of users. The recommender system has been widely used in e-commerce platforms and digital content platforms.

　　Influencing factors of excessive use of digital content platforms

　　There are many reasons for the excessive use of digital content platforms. Understanding the reasons of the formation will help us avoid this phenomenon. Hasan et al. Conducted an empirical study on the excessive use of online video streaming services and divided the factors affecting their excessive use into three major categories (motivation, psychological factors, and recommender systems)

　　(1) Motivation

　　Motivation allows users to get expectations from devices or media, which will bring satisfaction. Existing studies divide motivation into three sub-factors: information search, pastime, and entertainment. Information search means that users tend to collect information by using platforms or media sources. Recreation refers to human activities that consume leisure time without an obvious destination. Entertainment refers to the need for humans to maintain entertainment.

　　(2) Psychological factors

　　As a source of information and entertainment, the use of video streaming sites is also susceptible to personal-level factors, such as their psychological characteristics. The most important psychological factors are self-control and self-esteem. Although self-control is an important factor to ensure that users avoid spending too much time on these platforms, self-esteem defines the importance of a person immersed in the world. People with poor self-control are likely to be excessively involved in video streaming services. Similarly, people with low self-esteem are more likely to overuse video streaming sites without peer pressure or judgment.

　　(3) Recommender system

　　The recommender system expands their interaction with the platform by recommending interesting and relevant content to platform users, which also causes people to become addicted to it. This targeted content recommender can extend the use of the platform beyond the expected time limit.

　　Disadvantages of excessive use of digital content platforms

　　When users of digital content platforms enjoy the convenience and desirable experience brought by the recommender system, they often inadvertently consume a lot of time on the digital content platform. While users are addicted to using digital content platforms, it may also lead to the spread of low-quality information content, which will adversely affect the network information. At the same time, it will cause the user's cognition to become narrow and even unidirectional.

　　Conclusions and Suggestions

　　To increase everyone's emphasis on the excessive use of digital content platforms, we introduced digital content platforms and personalized recommenders, and pointed out the influencing factors and negative effects of excessive use of digital content platforms. Regarding its influencing factors and negative effects, we mainly make suggestions from the following aspects:

　　(1) For digital content platform manufacturers

　　Platform manufacturers should further improve the algorithm of personalized recommender systems, improve product recommendation functions, provide as many diversified recommendations as possible, and avoid the narrowing of information caused by a single recommender.

　　At the same time, platform vendors should improve the check-up mechanism, strengthen content supervision, consciously integrate diverse information content, timely filter false, vulgar, and information that does not conform to mainstream values, continuously improve the quality of content, and build a diverse and harmonious information environment.

　　(2) For students who study at home

　　First, formulate a learning plan to ensure learning efficiency. Studying at home requires self-control, formulate a detailed study plan every day, complete step by step, balance your study or work time and entertainment time to improve efficiency.

　　Second, moderate entertainment and enrich entertainment methods. While using the Internet for entertainment, you can also settle to read books, watch some English movies, etc. to enrich your entertainment methods and avoid excessive use of a single entertainment method.

　　By the College of Management and Economics