Private Responses for Public Sharing:
Understanding Self-Presentation and Relational
Maintenance via Stories in Social Media
Penny Triệu
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI, US
dieptl@umich.edu
Nancy K. Baym
Microsoft Research
Cambridge, MA, US
baym@microsoft.com
ABSTRACT
With nearly two billion users, social media Stories—an
ephemeral format of sharing—are increasingly popular and
projected to overtake sharing via public feeds. Sharing via
Stories differs from Feeds sharing by removing the visible
feedback (e.g. “likes” and “comments”) which has come to
characterize social media. Given the salience of responses
visibility to self-presentation and relational maintenance in
social media literature, we conducted semi-structured
interviews (N = 22) to explore how people understand these
processes when using Stories. We find that users have lower
expectations for responses with Stories and experience lower
pressure for self-presentation. This fosters more frequent
sharing and a sense of daily connectedness, which strong ties
can find valuable. Finally, the act of viewing takes on new
significance of signaling attention when made known to the
sharer. Our findings point to the importance of effort and
attention in understanding responses on social media.
Author Keywords
Social media; Stories; relational maintenance; self-
presentation; social media responses
CSS Concepts
• Human-centered computing → Social media
INTRODUCTION
Responses to social media sharing constitute an essential
element of the social media experience, with implications for
both how people curate their sharing on social media and
how people support their relationships on these platforms.
Bazarova and Choi [1], for example, find that when people
share publicly on Facebook, they are often seeking social
validation or relational development, and providing feedback
is one way audience can support these goals. Social media
self-presentation often tends toward the socially-desirable
[2]. This is at least in part because people have to consider
the possible visible responses to sharing and even strategize
to receive these responses [3]. Relational maintenance on
social media also partly depends on responses as a way to
signal relational investment and support [4]. As instrumental
as responses are to social media processes and scholarship,
much of this literature has built on the assumption that
responses to social media posts are visible to those posts’
audiences [5, 6]. Such visibility means the responses
themselves become part of the shared content. Indeed, public
responses on social media can influence how people respond
to posts [6], evaluate the sharer [7], and shift the sharer’s
self-perception [8]. Similarly, public responses can serve as a
form of public association and endorsement of relationships
[9].
What happens, then, when new ways of sharing diverge from
this paradigm? The format of social media Stories—an
ephemeral form of sharing on platforms such as Facebook,
Instagram, WhatsApp, and Snapchat—has grown immensely
in popularity in recent years. With close to two billion users
[10, 11], Stories sharing was “on a path to surpass feeds as
the primary way people share things with their friends
sometime [in 2019]” according to Facebook chief product
officer [12]. Sharing via Stories differs from other social
media posts in both ephemerality, and, as discussed in this
paper, the absence of visible feedback (e.g. “likes” and
“comments”) that have come to characterize social media
communication. In addition, scholarship has focused on
modes of sharing where knowing who and how many people
look at a post often involves guesswork [13, 14]. For most
social media posts, sharers do not know whether others have
seen it, unless the viewer “like,” “comment,” or otherwise
make their attention visible. With social media Stories, a list
of contacts who have viewed the Stories is provided for the
poster, but not visible to anyone else. The viewers list for
Stories makes the very act of viewing visible.
This paper explores the consequences of these features. For
self-presentation, the lack of visible responses potentially de-
emphasizes the necessity and social status associated with
high level of responses and, along with it, the need to
“perform” an image via social media postings. However,
since the Stories posting could still potentially be seen by the
entire network anyway and can be updated multiple times per
day, the self-presentational pressure may still persist and
become even more relentless. The provision of a viewer list
could further enhance the surveillance and performative
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376549
Figure 1. Highlighted circles signal that an Instagram
user has a new Stories posting. Viewers click on the
display picture to see the post (similar to Snapchat)
Figure 2. Stories display on Snapchat takes
on entire screen (similar to Instagram)
aspects of sharing. The implications of Stories for relational
maintenance are similarly unclear. When people know
exactly who is looking at their content, how might that
influence the functions of responses? Moreover, who
responds to Stories may also differ from who responds to
public posts, given that more private channels can be more
intimate and reserved for stronger ties [1].
In this paper, we asks how people perceive and practice self-
presentation (RQ1) and relational maintenance (RQ2) on
Stories, given the private feedback mechanism. For self-
presentation, we find that the private responses lower
expectations for receiving responses, downplay pressure for
polished self-presentation, and preclude any negative
feedback from affecting the sharer’s image. For relational
maintenance, we find that the act of viewing becomes more
meaningful when made visible via the viewer list and that the
private feedback can open up more chances for extended
conversations.
This analysis of responses to Stories enables us to distinguish
the importance of responses that are public from that of
responses per se. This contributes to dissecting the emerging,
yet increasingly important, model of sharing via Stories by
showing how self-presentation and relational maintenance
function through responses to Stories. We also contribute to
understanding of the mechanisms through which responses
affect self-presentation and relational maintenance more
broadly. We argue that responses signal both
acknowledgement of the effort made by the sharer and the
audiences’ effort to display attention on social media
platforms. We thus affirm the role of responses as signals of
attention and investment identified in prior literature, while
extending it to a new context.
RELATED WORK
Social media Stories at the time of Writing
The Stories format was first introduced on Snapchat in
October, 2013 [15]. In August 2016, Instagram, owned by
Facebook, became the next major platform to adopt its own
version of Stories [16]. Facebook and WhatsApp, both
owned by Facebook, followed in adding this feature. All of
the participants in our research study used Instagram Stories,
Snapchat Stories or both, except for one person who used
Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories. The following
descriptions focus on Stories as operated by Instagram and
Snapchat at the time of the research.
When user posts new social media Stories, the content of
their updates is not automatically displayed on a feed—
unlike the front-facing views on Instagram and Facebook.
Instead, a highlighted circle signifies that a user has a new
Stories update, and the viewer can click on the highlighted
circle to see that update (see Figure 1). The content of the
update can be a picture, a video, or text. When viewed, the
update always takes up the entire screen (see Figure 2). Story
updates display one at a time. One person can upload
multiple Stories posts at any given time, which means each
post will be displayed chronologically one after another. The
Stories updates disappear after 24 hours, unless saved
elsewhere, such as the Highlights section on Instagram. With
small exceptions, such as a poll on Instagram Stories, there is
no way to make a public response to a Stories post. Viewers
can click on a dialog box and type a message or click on a
provided emoji, which becomes a private chat to the receiver.
Finally, a list of how many and who have viewed a Stories
posting is provided for sharers and constantly updated to
reflect new views. Snapchat pauses after each person’s Story,
allowing the viewer to exit out before proceeding to the next
person. On Instagram, users must click on a specific Story to
view it, but the stream of Stories then moves automatically
from one person’s story to the next. On Instagram, the user is
thus offered less control over who to view.
Self-Presentation and Responses on Social Media
Self-presentation is “the process of controlling how one is
perceived by other people” [17]. Goffman, in particular, [18]
articulates a dramaturgical perspective on this process.
Specifically, Goffman argues that self-presentation is a
performance in which people present different aspects of
themselves to different interaction partners at different times
[18]. Self-presentation on social media often occurs through
a public profile, which enables users to “maintain unique
collections of personal attributes created by the user, their
network, and/or the platform” [19]. Social media users also
tend to accumulate a network of known ties of disparate
contexts (e.g. work colleagues, school mates, or family
members) on these platforms [20]. As such, self-presentation
on social media typically involves sharing content to a large
network of ties from different social circles, a phenomenon
termed context collapse [21, 22]. Social media self-
presentation has been compared to an exhibition [23] and to
shouting in a public square [2], demonstrating key
characteristics of social media sharing: publicness,
persistence, and scrutiny and commentary from an unknown
or ambiguous audience (with exceptions such as the Stories
format discussed here, posts in Facebook Groups, or
LinkedIn profiles).
Such conditions help explain the ubiquity of the one-click
responses on social media, such as the “like” button on
Facebook or the “favorite” button on Twitter. Since
responses play such a salient role for audience members,
social media users in turn have to consider these responses in
determining their self-presentation. From the sharer
perspective, these clicks can signal agreement or support of
their self-presentation [24]. More than half of the Facebook
users surveyed by Scissors, Burke and Wengrovitz [24]
indicated that getting enough likes for their posts was at least
somewhat important. People may even delete posts that do
not receive sufficient public feedback [3]. From the audience
perspective, public responses to a post provide an additional
metric, which may influence perception of the post itself [5,
6]. For instance, adolescents were more likely to “like” a
photo with many likes, compared to those same photos but
shown with fewer likes [5]. Additionally, fMRI brain scans
of these participants showed greater activity in “neural
regions implicated in reward processing, social cognition,
imitation, and attention” when viewing photos with many
“likes” among adolescents [5]. In addition, third-party
viewers relied more on comments from friends—rather than
self-generated claims by the sharers—in evaluating how
extroverted a sharer on Facebook was [6]. When people
share publicly to Facebook, receiving public feedback
increases how much they internalize the postings to their self-
views, compared to when they receive the same feedback—
but privately [8]. In other words, the evaluation of self-
presentation on social media involves both the original
content shared and the visible responses to such sharing.
Consequently, this potential of receiving public feedback,
and how audience members perceive such feedback, is key to
social media self-presentation.
Self-presentation via Stories removes this pressure of public
feedback from sharing. Furthermore, Stories postings are
ephemeral, lasting only 24 hours. Ephemeral social media
posts offer an appealing alternative to the currently dominant
feeds sharing [25, 26], whose self-presentational settings
have grown increasingly inhibitive [2, 27]. However,
research on self-presentation on Stories suggests that people
still face self-presentational pressure due to the public nature
of Stories. Specifically, people aim to post more noteworthy
experiences and content that would be broadly interesting to
everyone and consciously refrain from selfies [28]. These
findings illustrated noted differences in self-presentation
strategies between Snapchat Stories and Snapchat private
messages, which seem to feature prominently selfies and
everyday moments [29, 30]. With a private message, the
scope of the audience is defined and known. In contrast,
when posting via Stories, people confront an audience of
their entire network. Given this more public sharing and the
salience of audience to people’s sharing decision [31], Stories
users may still have to exercise caution in their self-
presentation and post for the “lowest-common-denominator”
[2, 23]. In summary, although people have to present
themselves to a public audience in Stories, they do not need
to be concerned about audience’s feedback being visible and
viewable by third parties. Given these contesting forces of
responses and audience pressure to Stories self-presentation,
we ask the following research question:
Research Question 1: How do Stories’ private response
mechanisms affect perceptions and practices of self-
presentation?
Stories’ Responses and Relational Maintenance
Public versus Private Responses & Relational Maintenance
Relational maintenance are actions taken “(1) to keep a
relationship in existence, (2) to keep a relationship in a
specified state or existence, (3) to keep a relationship in
satisfactory condition, and (4) to keep a relationship in
repair.” [32] Feedback on social media is a mechanism of
relational maintenance [4, 33-35], even at the lightweight
level of one-click “likes,” “favorites,” or “hearts.” Given that
feeds on most social media sites are algorithmically filtered
so that users may not see everything post shared by their
network, responses help audience members signal that they
have seen and paid attention to a post [36, 37]. Sharers
similarly use responses to estimate the audience size of their
posts, even if these responses may not provide the most
reliable cues [13].
The quality of responses received and satisfaction with those
responses are strongly related to overall satisfaction with the
sharing experience [38]. People expect, and find it important,
to receive responses from strong ties, such as close friends or
romantic partners [24, 39]. Receiving more responses than
expected by the sharers also helps the sharers feel more
connected to their networks [39]. The prominence and
usefulness of responses as a relational maintenance tool
hence emerges clearly from research conducted in public
responses contexts. One possible reason is that, in these
contexts, the visibility of others’ responses constitutes a
public endorsement of relationship and enhances the
relationship [4, 40]. That is, by leaving a response visible to
the sharer, as well as other viewers of the post, one is willing
to make known and visible one’s association with the sharer
of the post [9].
However, for people who want to communicate about more
intimate or sensitive topics to seek support, social media
platforms may be too prohibitive due to self-presentational
norms [41-44]. Alternatively, when people make a public
disclosure on social media, the default option is, in turn, a
public response to their updates. Such publicness can make
the support received appear less authentic [42]. As illustrated
by Bazarova [44] via experimental methods, people see
intimate disclosures made publicly as less appropriate than
those made privately.
With social media Stories, two important functions of social
media responses as typically studied are absent, or
unnecessary: (1) the signaling of attention, negated by the
viewers list and (2) the public performance of relationship,
negated by the private mechanism of responses. Nonetheless,
the responses sent to social media Stories postings may be
more supportive of relationship maintenance, given that they
are composed messages, instead of a one-click reaction, sent
via one-on-one private channels. In a longitudinal
investigation of Facebook use and well-being, frequency of
composed communication with strong ties, including private
messaging and comments, predicted increases in well-being
[34]. Notably, none of the other forms of communication,
including all communication with weak ties or one-click
responses between strong ties, predicted increases in well-
being [34]. Private channels are also where people are more
likely to disclose more intimate information on social media
[1].
Viewing Receipts as a Form of Communication
Moreover, making visible the act of viewing can also have
implications for viewing behaviors and interpretations of
such behaviors. Previous research on this form of viewing
receipts—such as LinkedIn viewing notifications or read
receipts Facebook Messenger—reveals that viewers may
intentionally maneuver around these features. For example,
on LinkedIn, a social media platform for professional
networking, Hoyle et al. found evidence of people choosing
not to view others’ profiles due to LinkedIn rendering this act
visible under certain privacy settings [45]. Interestingly, a
minority of participants (16%) also indicated intentionally
viewing content to express professional or personal interests
in the profiles [45]. A majority of participants (70.7%)
viewed the profiles of people who had viewed their profiles.
These findings suggest that when platforms make viewing
behaviors visible, users can use them as a networking
strategy. In another study on messaging read receipts, 68.4%
of participants reported avoiding seeing a message on
Facebook Messenger; among these respondents, a majority
cited not wanting the seen receipts to show up as the reason
[46]. Indeed, not receiving response while seeing a seen
receipts can invoke in senders negative emotions, especially
for those with higher need to belong and fear of ostracism
[47].
Just as the novel features of the Stories format may affect
how people perceive and practice self-presentation, they
seem likely to affect relational maintenance. We ask:
Research Question 2: How do Stories’ private response
mechanisms affect people’s perceptions and practices of
relational maintenance?
METHODS
The main aim of our study is to achieve an in-depth
understanding of relatively novel phenomena around Stories.
As such, we adopted semi-structured interviews as our
method. The strengths of semi-structured interviews include
a rich and contextualized understanding of the lived
experiences of our participants. We conducted semi-
structured interviews, lasting approximately 60 minutes, with
22 participants between June and August 2018. We
employed convenience sampling and recruited the majority
of our participants by emailing the interns at the Microsoft
office in Cambridge, MA, United States—in addition to from
personal networks and posting flyers in nearby areas. We
targeted the interns, because they were more likely than full
time employees to be of the demographics to use Stories.
Indeed, most of our participants were college students, who
are frequent [48]—and intense [49]—users of Instagram and
Snapchat, popular Stories platforms. As such, this sample
could be particularly meaningful for achieving an in-depth
understanding of Stories.
We described the study as an interview study about use of
social media Stories and recruited for adults who use social
media Stories. Before scheduling the interview, we asked
participants which platforms they posted Stories to and how
often to verify their eligibility. Participants received a $20
Amazon gift card as a token of appreciation. We stopped
recruiting after reaching saturation: we started to notice the
same themes around participants’ Stories perceptions and
practices for the last few interviews. At the end of the
interviews, we asked participants to provide their age,
gender, and occupation (see Table 1). We referred to our
participants in the paper with pseudonyms that they offered
or created by us (if not offered by participants). We received
IRB approval for the interview questions, recruiting
strategies, and the handling of personally identifiable
information.
Four of the interviews took place via Skype, and we
conducted the remainder in person. Interviews began with a
brief inquiry into the social media sites that participants use
and then turned to focus on Stories. We asked how they
decided what to post, what kinds of responses they received,
how they interpreted those responses, and how they
responded to others’ Stories. We recorded the audio of all
interviews.
All the interviews were transcribed with an IRB and GDPR-
compliant transcription service. After verifying the accuracy
of the transcription, we then exported the transcripts to
Atlas.TI, where one of the authors conducted iterative coding
as delineated by Charmaz’s grounded theory practice [50].
The coder developed the initial codebook based on research
questions, as well as themes noted from interviews. The
coder coded the first few interviews based on this codebook.
The authors then discussed the codes and identified important
emerging themes. From these discussions, the coder refined
the codebook by collapsing codes that were similar to one
another and devised new codes for important phenomena.
The coder then used the revised codebook to re-code the first
four interviews as well as to code the remainder of the
interviews. The authors had regular meetings to discuss key
themes of the findings. In constructing our findings, we also
pay attention to negative cases to see where one particular
phenomenon may or may not apply. Quotes in the Findings
section have been lightly edited for readability.
Methodological Limitations
Many of our interviewees skewed younger and were more
technologically savvy. We also recruited via convenience
sampling, which further limited generalizability of findings.
We make no claim that the specific interpretations and
practices we highlight here are the only ones, nor that they
are universal. The aims of our study are to surface
phenomena around Stories use, not generalizable finding for
the entire population. Future studies can consider exploring
or verifying the generalizability of these themes by
interviewing different populations and with complementary
methods such as surveys and experiments.
FINDINGS
RQ1: Private Feedback and Self-Presentation
Our first research question asked how participants presented
themselves on Stories, given the private feedback. In our
interviews, we took care not to mention the lack of public
responses until one of our last interview questions to avoid
biasing participants’ answers. Yet, we found it was
nonetheless influential throughout the interviews. The
relationship between private feedback and low self-
presentational pressure was twofold. First, there was a
mutually held perception between sharer and viewer that
Stories postings largely did not need feedback, which freed
people from having to consider the feedback when posting.
Second, any feedback was private and known only to the
sharer, and this precluded the feedback from negatively
influencing perception of their posting. We discuss each of
these below.
Low Expectations for Feedback and Low Self-Presentational
Pressure for Sharing
Consistent with McRoberts et al. [28], our participants
described their Stories posting as lower pressure and much
more relaxed than posts on other platforms such as Instagram
and Facebook feeds. In explaining the low pressure, the lack
of public feedback and low expectations for responses are
among the primary reasons.
In deciding what to post to Stories or how often to post, our
participants generally opted to show interesting content or
snippets from their lives. At the same time, they held that
content to a lower standard than a post to the regular feed.
Several of our participants also described posting to Stories
more when there were interesting events in their life, such as
the activities of their summer or from their travels. When
asked about their thoughts on Stories not having “likes” and
comments, most of our participants enjoyed that there was no
mechanism for visible feedback with Stories. They associated
the absence of feedback with a lower bar for what can be
shared. This lack of expectation freed them from having to
account for feedback in deliberating what to share to Stories.
The lack of expectation also deviated from feeds sharing,
where expectation for feedback was instrumental for the
sharing process [35]. One participant, M3gh@nn, pointed
out:
I feel like it’s great that [Stories] doesn’t have Like…. I feel
like the part of the no pressure or the low pressureness of
Stories is that it’s more about sharing just to share…There’s
no thought in your mind about how many likes is this going
to get? It’s not even an option.
Enjoying the freedom from public responses with Stories
does not preclude receiving pleasure from public responses in
other formats. For most of our respondents, the “likes” and
“comments” that were unfavorable when associated with
Stories were appreciated and important for feed posts. For
Pseudonym
Age
Gender
Occupation
Plat-
form
Sara
21
M
Student/intern
S
M3gh@nn
28
W
Student
I
Ashley
25
M
Chemist
I
Bart
29
M
Research assistant, PhD student
I
Diane
32
W
Researcher/intern
I
Mike
26
M
Graduate student
I
Iris
28
W
Librarian
I, S
Naraic
36
M
Animal Technician
S
Sammus
32
W
Rapper, Producer, PhD Student
I
Bryant
21
M
Computer engineer
S
Elizabeth
20
W
Student/intern
S
Amy
19
W
Student/intern
I, S
David
20
M
Student/Intern
S
Jamie Bond
21
W
Student/intern
S
Sapphire
19
W
Student
S
Dmitri
20
M
Student/intern
S
Lan
19
W
Student/intern
S
Milo
20
M
Student/intern
I, S
Junie
22
W
Student/intern
I, F
Elsa
20
W
Student/intern
S
Devin
20
M
Student/intern
S
Holly
20
W
Student/intern
S
Table 1. Participant information
M = Man; W = Woman
I = Instagram; S = Snapchat; F = Facebook
example, Sapphire, who did not even look at her list of
audience for Snapchat Stories, stated “what’s the point”
when asked what it would mean to her if Instagram were to
entirely do away with likes or comments. Our respondents
explained the value of these metrics in terms of effort. Not
only did they put effort into making those posts, they
understood responses to them as validations of that effort.
When participants posted to the regular Instagram or
Facebook feeds, they expected responses and were
accordingly mindful of crafting a post worthy of such
responses. When asked what it would mean to him were
Stories to start including likes and comments, Dmitri
highlighted the circular relationships between having the
ability to respond, expectations for responses, and pressure
on higher quality post on social media:
I feel like [not having likes and comments for Snapchat
Stories] is kind of better because when you add the like and
comments feature, then there’s also a little pressure to start
liking and commenting, which means that you have to spend
more time per Story. I think the appeal of Stories is it’s very
quick and you get a good idea of what people are up to with
very little involvement on your behalf ….generally Stories
are designed so that they are of the quality where they
normally don’t require a response.
In other words, whether on the feed or in Stories, audience
responses serve to acknowledge the effort a sharer put into
their posting. With Stories, where sharing is more in-the-
moment and lower effort, viewers express less need to
acknowledge the sharing with responses. In parallel, sharers,
who view their Stories as low effort, have low expectations
of receiving responses to them as a result.
Private Feedback Serving as Protection Mechanism
The private feedback also serves as a protection for the
sharer. No matter how the post is received, most of the
feedback is obscured from audience. Jamie Bond explained:
[Posting to Stories is] like putting something against a glass
window and being like “Here. You can’t do anything to it,
but here. You don’t have to deal with or worry about
somebody saying something that you might not want. So if
somebody is like “Well, this is stupid” then you could be like
“Okay.” No one else is going to see that they said that,
though, so it doesn’t matter.
In another instance of employing the protection of private
responses, Milo relayed his strategy of posting a Story where
he blocked all but a single person from seeing. Since the
responses and the viewer list were private, Milo’s intended
viewer could not tell that they were the only one able to see
Milo’s Story, allowing Milo to effectively send a one-on-one
message disguised as a one-to-many messages. He
elaborated:
Well, if you like somebody and then you happen to take a
really good picture of yourself, then you want them to see it,
but you don’t want to snap them because it will look pushy,
you will post on your story and then you would block other
people. So then, that person will actually see it without
having to snap them.
This strategy for self-presentation in service of relationship
building speaks to how deeply self-presentation ties into
relationship processes.
RQ2: Private Feedback & Relational Maintenance
Our second research question asks how Stories sharing and
responding foster relational maintenance. We emphasize how
participants make sense of the viewers list and use the private
message response mechanism. Our interviews show that the
lightweight nature of Stories encouraged more quotidian
sharing that helped people keep up with close ties’ daily
lives. Moreover, the viewers list—while not intended to be a
response itself—took on the symbolic meaning of a response
because a viewer’s choice to watch a person’s story was
made visible. Relatedly, our interviews with participants
revealed deliberation around whose Stories postings to
watch, although several participants approached watching
Stories out of habit or boredom, instead of interest in a
specific poster. Finally, Stories’ one-on-one response
mechanism fostered catching up between ties because its
privacy allowed a Story to serve as a conversation opener.
We elaborate on each of these findings below.
Keeping Up with Daily Life via Stories
Watching other people’s Stories and posting Stories provided
a convenient way for our participants to keep up with their
ties’ daily lives, as well as share their own. Earlier, we
discussed that sharing via Stories involves lower pressure and
is thus more lightweight, partly thanks to the private
responses. As a result, people can post to Stories more
frequently—and about more quotidian events than they
would on their feed. Consequently, especially for strong ties
such as close friends or family members, audience members
appreciate Stories for allowing them to see glimpses into the
sharers’ lives. When asked if there are things her parents
would not learn otherwise if not for her Stories postings, Lan
answered:
they get to see what I’m doing [much] more frequently. I call
my parents once a week on FaceTime and I can only
remember so much during that time [versus] little snippets
every day [via posting Stories]. I think they get a better
understanding of what I am going through here.
Not only did audiences of Stories see more glimpses of daily
lives thanks to the frequent sharing, they also viewed Stories
as showing more “real” and ordinary moments from others’
lives, as opposed to the feed. Participants, like Iris, described
the feed as “hyper-curated” or only showing the best
moments from people’s lives:
even when I’m looking at my [Instagram] feed, and it’s
usually really nice, well-crafted photos, and then the Insta
stories would be them making funny faces or ridiculous poses
and stuff, and it makes them seem more like real people
rather than just like sort of flat characters
That the content shared on Stories was more representative of
daily life also helped the sharers feel as if the viewers were
connected to the lives they led, which may differ from the
less frequent and more polished images that they shared
elsewhere. Bart, a participant who lived in a rural area and far
away from his friends, answered our questions about the
value of responses to his Stories by saying:
because I live the life that I do, and I live in a more rural
area, and I don’t have a lot of friends that I can hang out
with in person, it is really helpful to get positive feedback on
the stuff that I post online, because I think that people are
able to…learn about my life…. It is useful to know that
people are keeping up with me….
Similarly, Elizabeth compared these daily glimpses against
postings on other social media platforms:
It’s more of a day-to-day, random moments, as opposed to
staged…like you’re more likely to spend 20 minutes editing a
photo for Facebook or Instagram, but Snapchat, you post it,
it’s done.
Thus, the lower pressure of Stories sharing means that not
only is sharing easy, the postings also often happen in the
moment and reflect current events in one person’s life. This
can create a sense of ongoing togetherness, especially when
people consistently view one another’s stories over time.
This stands in contrast to Instagram or Facebook updates that
may be a highly polished portrayal of events which happened
weeks ago or only major life announcements.
Deciding and Managing Whose Stories to View
The viewers list is another key element in relational
maintenance processes via Stories. Compared to feed
posting, the viewers list—which shows exactly how many
and which users have seen a Stories update—is a novel
feature of Stories. In addition, unlike with feed sharing,
people may specifically click on Stories to start viewing
them, making the act of viewing at least interpretable as more
intentional.
From our interviews, we find the decision to view Stories to
range in its intentionality, from purely habitual to very
deliberate. First, several participants acknowledged that they
viewed Stories out of boredom and habit—instead of an
inherent interest in the sharers—and assumed the same of
their own Stories’ viewers. For example, Bart observed that
the same set of people always view his Stories first and
suggested that some viewers of his Instagram Stories tend to
be habitual viewers of Stories:
it’s usually the same people…especially the first people to
view my stuff, because I just assume that those people are
just like addicted to Instagram and are just always looking at
it, so it is not just about seeing the story.
This assumption of Stories viewing out of habits and
automaticity was often applied to weak tie viewers. Elsa said:
“If it’s someone who I’m not super close with, then I’ll just
assume that they just tapped through everyone’s stories at
once.” This reasoning for Stories viewing possibly stems
from perceptions of Stories postings as often “boring” or
“ordinary,” making it less likely that a weak tie would be
interested in such updates.
Although this mindset of habitual watching may apply for
several of our participants or to certain type of ties in one’s
network, there were also many instances of intentional
Stories viewing among our participants. For example, some
participants responded that they make sure to watch updates
from strong ties such as close friends, romantic partners, or
family members. In contrast, people deliberately avoided
watching Stories by contacts who they were in sensitive
situations with, such as former romantic partners. Amy
expressed why she would not view the Stories posting by her
former partner: “I don’t want them to think that I still care
what they’re up to.” Furthermore, the difference between
how participants interpret the intentionality of Stories
viewing can lie with platform’s features. Once you click on
an Instagram Stories, you can be automatically directed to the
next person’s Stories, without any preview of who it may be.
Meanwhile, after viewing one person’s Snapchat Stories, you
have an option to see whom you will view next before
proceeding. Although this is a subtle difference, the extra
click and pause before viewing with Snapchat can underscore
intentionality behind the act of viewing. The (non)responsive
quality of visible Story viewing can thus serve as a marker of
relational dissolution as well as maintenance.
Stories Viewing Serving as Signal of Attention.
When we asked interviewees how they approach the viewers
list and whether there were some people they wished would
view their Stories, we found that the signal of viewing takes
on varied significance among our participants. The
significance also differed across disparate types of audience
members. As discussed above, external reasons such as
boredom or habit may sometimes motivate Stories viewing,
which consequently renders viewing as an unreliable signal
of interest. That said, certain participants found the signal of
viewing to be important or enjoyable when it came from
people such as their crushes, romantic partners, or family
members. This is in keeping with earlier findings about
visible forms of responses, such as Facebook “likes” [24].
The act of viewing with social media Stories, particularly
with Snapchat Stories, serves as a signal of attention due to
its intentional and self-selecting nature: at least at the start,
people have to opt to click on a Story and have control over
what they view, as opposed to the feed displaying posts to
them [28]. In describing the significance placed on his
romantic interest viewing his Stories, Naraic ascribed “[an]
interest in what I’m up to or an interest in me as an
individual” to the act of viewing. As a result, while likes,
comments, and other sorts of responses may be essential for
showing effort in other modes, in Stories, viewing itself
demonstrates investing effort (albeit small) into a
relationship. Milo further compared the experience of the
viewer list to a “like” on social media:
I guess the satisfaction from seeing people who look at my
Stories who don’t typically [click ‘like’ on] my pictures… It’s
like: “Ha! Caught you! You are actually seeing my posts but
you didn’t ‘like’ it!”
In other words, the viewers list, while not explicitly built as a
feedback mechanism, takes on the significance of a response
mechanism in signaling one person’s attention to another.
The same act of viewing takes on the meaning of interest
when rendered visible. The symbolic meaning of attention
conveyed via the act of viewing Stories was particularly
striking with one of our participants, Mike. He was not aware
of the viewers list until our interview. Once he learned that
others could see him viewing them, Mike expressed
intentions to revise his viewing practice:
I told you earlier that usually when I use my story, I just go
through everything and I swipe, swipe, swipe until I go the
end of the last stop. But now…I might not go through all the
lists because I mean, sometimes I don’t really care about
them that much. Maybe I should not look at them…if they’ll
see me on the list, maybe they’ll think I care when I actually
don’t care.
Learning that others could tell when he viewed their Stories
prompted Mike to assign meaning to his act of viewing: the
same mindless viewing may signal “caring” when the sharer
is aware. Similarly, Elizabeth recounted her realization as she
first learned about the viewers list:
[Learning about the viewers list] made me consider, “What
if my ex posted a story?”… and then it made me realize that
that person that I’ve been trying to avoid has seen that I look
at his stories, which was a painful realization.
Opening Extended Conversations with Responses to Stories
Our findings suggest that people may not respond privately
to stories very often. When responses did occur, however,
our findings suggested that they could serve as
conversational openers that foster catching up. Since Story
responses routed to a one-on-one chat space, the sharer and
responder can have an extended conversation that would
otherwise be unwieldy or too visible in the public comment
space, as Devin explained:
I think people don’t want to have public conversations that
often or at least my friends. And if they reach out to me
privately on Snapchat then we can have an actual
conversation rather than like a comments thing that might
bother other people.
Second, with the live and instant norm of posting to Stories,
people understood that whatever was happening in a Stories
update was going on at the moment, evoking conversations
around that topic. In contrast, an Instagram post in a certain
location may mean someone was there weeks ago, making it
less certain that the location was still an appropriate topic of
discussion. Ashley likened the experience to meeting
someone you have not seen in a while:
Initially, it’s [the response] obviously about the context and
then go on to be, like, how have you been? It’s been so long.
I’m not saying it’s a follow-up through all the way, but it’s a
short catchup and what are you doing in your life right now,
basically if you see someone in a long time in person or it
would be awkward to just say that’s cool.
DISCUSSION
Compared to the feed posts that are the usual objects of social
media scholarship concerning self-presentation and relational
maintenance, Stories postings feature the same audience but
differ in the private mechanism of responses. Such conditions
provide the opportunity to see deeper dynamics of social
media responses in these processes and to understand which
are due to responses and which to platform design. Our
interview study investigates how people understand social
media Stories and how the private response mechanism
shapes users’ self-presentational and relational maintenance
practices. Our findings indicated that people experienced
reduced self-presentational pressure with Stories, which they
associated with lower expectations around responses and the
protection provided by private responses. For relational
maintenance, the act of viewing Stories sometimes sent a
signal of attention and interest that fostered relationships,
even if minimally. This is evident by the attention many of
our participants paid to the viewers list and to managing
whose Stories to view. Finally, though private responses to
Stories posts were infrequent, such responses could initiate
extended, one-on-one conversations that helped people stay
close.
Although we studied a relative novel platform, from our
findings, we seek to highlight basic mechanisms that may
extend to all form of responses on social media, heeding the
call for grounding in technology scholars [51]. To this goal,
for our Discussion, we draw attention to two salient aspects
important to making sense of feedback on social media,
beyond Stories: (1) the relationship between effort and
expectations and (2) signaling of attention.
Social Media Responses and Expectations of Effort
Expectations of responses for feed sharing is an instrumental
dimension of social media platforms [35]. However, in
contrast to previous work, which consistently showed the
importance of receiving ample public feedback for Feeds
sharing [38, 39], we found that people have few expectations
of receiving responses for Stories, partially attributed to the
responses being private. This distinction between private
versus public responses, however, supports a shared theme
about responses, regardless of platform: they provide sharers
and audience members a way to create, and fulfill,
expectations of effort.
The distinction made by our participants seems to lie in the
effort invested in each type of postings. Effort has always
been a salient aspect of relational exchanges [52]. In building
a messaging a system to nudge users to write increasingly
longer messages, thus expending more effort, Kelly et al.
[52] found that some participants appreciated this nudge and
saw the longer messages as potentially more meaningful. Our
findings point to how this emphasis of effort also occurs in
the realm of public postings in the exchange of posting and
responding effort. When people share to the feeds—where
public responses are possible and expected—they work to
ensure that their posts are worthy of responses. Several of our
participants elaborated that, for an Instagram post, they
would have to plan out the photo and post after sufficient
editing. In turn, as viewers, they recognize the effort exerted
and the expectations placed in a feed post and respond
accordingly—giving out clicks and comments. Stories
postings, on the other hand, seem to discourage effort. The
norm is to capture and post in the moment, often with the
built-in camera in the application. Furthermore, Stories
postings are ephemeral, disappearing after 24 hours.
Consequently, sharers neither expect nor desire the responses
that would be integral to feed sharing [35]. Stories viewers
also share this perception and do not feel expectations to
respond to the Stories they view. While social media research
has always underscored the importance and expectations of
response to sharing, our findings offer an explanation for this
phenomena: a mutually held set of expectations between the
effort it takes to create a post and the effort it takes to
respond.
Future work should investigate these themes further as norms
start to coalesce around these emerging forms of sharing. For
example, as Stories postings start to replace feeds sharing,
would people come to expect more engagement with these
postings in terms of responses? In addition, Stories postings
originated from Snapchat, which has always embraced a
norm of quotidian and lightweight sharing [30]. As they
become more popular on platforms associated with polished
sharing, such as Facebook and Instagram, expectations for
the quality of post may differ from the current norms of
lower effort postings. Finally, without public responses, how
are sharers determining what type of content their audience
finds interesting and desirable in order to fine-tune their
subsequent posts?
Social Media Responses Signal Attention
Previous research has theorized that the signaling of
relational investment and attention is a particularly salient
aspect of social media platforms [4, 53]. Although these
platforms frequently feature explicit replies as a central
feature of the sharing experience, people find implicit
mechanisms of responses elsewhere. For instance, the
viewing of profiles in LinkedIn [45] or the checking of
messages in a system without any notification built by Kelly
et al. [52] both provided communication partners with signals
of interests. This is because the act of clicking presumably
comes from an interest in the target in these cases. With feeds
sharing, this signaling seems to occur via lightweight
responses.
What we surface here is how this signaling of attention by
the feedback giver—or the interpretation of attention by the
feedback receiver—occurs via Stories’ viewers list, a feature
typically absent for feed posts. As such, the viewers list
becomes a vessel for attention exchange. Indeed, the
language our participants used to describe whose Stories they
choose to view or what they think of people who view their
Stories bore strong resemblance to how the “like” button has
been discussed and studied [37]. That is, both the “like”
button and the act of viewing someone’s Stories could be
described as a lightweight action to maintain contact and to
gesture your continued interest in weak ties [37]. However,
as reminiscent of the “like” button, the intentionality behind
the act of Stories viewing is ambiguous: some participants
view Stories habitually without much deliberation over
whose Stories they are viewing, while others go to great
lengths to avoid viewing Stories by certain contacts. Finally,
for strong ties, the act of viewing Stories may feel
compulsory, similar to the expectations for a “like” [24, 37].
These findings affirm that the relational use of social media
sharing and response requires negotiating and assigning
symbolic meaning to the technological features offered by
these platforms. Just as the one-click feedback (e.g. “likes,”
“hearts,” or “favorites”) and “comment” can take on a variety
of meanings and functions with feeds sharing, people can
find meaning in the viewers list beyond its face value. The
act of viewing a Stories is often self-selecting [28], and the
act of viewing is rendered visible to the sharer. Together, this
makes it possible to read the viewing of Stories as a signal of
interest, even when it may in fact result from automatic or
bored viewing rather than genuine interest. That is, not only
is the viewer seen as intentionally interested in a Stories post,
they are seen as willing to let the other party know that they
have seen it. One popular press writer has even extolled the
Snapchat viewers list as the tool to tell whether your
romantic interests are reciprocated [54]. Given this
combination, the act of viewing a post in and of itself on
Stories becomes a gesture of attention and an indicator of
caring about the other person, whether intentional or
otherwise.
The multitude of interpretations around the meaning of
viewing someone’s Stories also harkens back to Goffman’s
distinction between impression “given” versus “given off”
[18]. Goffman distinguished between impression “given”
(what someone intentionally wanted to convey) versus
impression “given off” (what someone unintentionally
conveyed). Goffman’s theory thus provides a useful lens to
contextualize findings around how people interpreted the
viewing signal. Given people’s idiosyncratic approaches to
the viewers’ list (how much attention someone pays to it,
how often someone looks, etc.), the impression “given off”
while viewing can vary widely. For example, if someone
always views another person’s Stories very soon after
posting, they may “give off” the impression of being
preoccupied with this person, but only if the other person
fastidiously checks their viewers list soon and frequently
after posting. These varied interpretations further attest to the
existence of different media ideologies [55] surrounding and
governing technology use and its consequences.
Design Implications for Publicness of Response
It is striking that our participants shared an almost universal
enjoyment of the private responses to Stories sharing.
Although many social media platforms default into public
modes of sharing and aggregate each discrete response (i.e. a
“like” or a comment) into numbers (i.e. 65 likes and 28
comments), certain sites are experimenting with hiding the
number of likes from the audience, such as Instagram and
Facebook [56]. In addition, other platforms with reduced
levels of publicness (i.e. Facebook Groups) or persistence of
content (Snapchat) are enjoying greater popularity [57].
These shifts suggest that both users and platform designers
are looking for alternative solutions to the tyranny of
publicness demanded of users typically. Considering
Goffman’s enduring theories on self-presentation [18], the
ability to have more control over audience for self-
presentation is more in line with how people typically prefer
to present. While sharing via Stories is public, people can
benefit from the assurance that each piece of response is seen
by them only and that no one else is privy to how their self-
presentation is being received by their separate social circles.
However, public responses could serve many purposes.
Andalibi et al. [43] found beneficial network effects among
people who choose to disclose their pregnancy loss online:
seeing the positive responses to one person’s disclosure of
pregnancy loss encouraged others to make the same
disclosure and allowed them to access social support.
Whether responses are public or private, there are hence
tradeoffs to the sharers and their audiences. Instagram, for
instance, cited mental health concerns around the restless
pressure of public feedback, especially on teenagers, as a
motivation behind the platform’s hiding “likes” [58]. Future
designs of platforms should consider iterating on these
choices and default options provided to users.
Design and Research Implications for Response’s Effort
Although posting to Stories largely involves lower effort
from both sharers and posters for each post, questions remain
around how these dynamics play out. First of all, while most
Stories do not receive a response, the responses that occur are
often more effortful and can even facilitate extended, private
exchanges. When we compare these responses to the
frequency or effortfulness of other types of composed
responses such as a comment to a public post or a private
message prompted by a public post, it is unknown whether
composed responses to Stories occur more or less frequently.
In other words, Stories postings may potentially serve to
encourage more one-on-one exchanges through their
response mechanism of private messages. On the other hand,
Instagram and Facebook now provide quick reaction to
Stories, where you can click once on one of the default
emojis to send a private reaction message. Although such
designs may make responses easier—and perhaps more
likely, platform designers should be mindful of intentionally
instilling low-effort responses. This is because effort is an
important consideration in relational maintenance, with
greater effort potentially gesturing more investment in a
relationship. Recent interventions in this topic have explored,
for example, messaging system that requires progressively
longer messages [52].
Moreover, as Stories posting and viewing become more
frequent, people may start to invest greater accumulative
effort into this genre of post as a whole. In other words,
sharing and viewing 50 low-effort Stories postings over a
month may require more time and energy than a single
polished Instagram post. As a medium, Stories postings can
be particularly useful in building a greater ambient awareness
of one’s network [59, 60], given its constancy and volume.
Ambient awareness of network has been associated with
beneficial implications for well-being. Future studies should
investigate this effect of Stories on relational investment via
quantitative methods (i.e. surveys, experiments, or
longitudinal studies) to determine the interpersonal and
psychological implications of Stories use.
CONCLUSION
In summary, the increasing popularity of Stories presents a
paradigm shift for social media users, and the invisibility of
feedback offers scholars the potential for new insights into
how relationships and selves are created and maintained
through online interactions. This paper highlights the thus far
under-examined negotiation of expectations around effort
and attention displays that may be integral to interpersonal
exchanges on social media. Whether sent privately or
publicly, our study reveals that social media responses serve
to (1) acknowledge mutually-held expectations between
sharers and audience about effort put into social media and
(2) send signals of attention and interest. With Stories, the
effort put into posting is often lower and associated with low
expectations and low level of responses. Secondly, we find
that participants search for and find cues of attention and
interest with Stories’ viewers list—functions scholars have
attributed to one-click feedback with feeds posting [37].
Importantly, we highlight how these functions emerge
independently of whether the responses were sent publicly or
privately, clarifying and supporting social media literature on
responses to public sharing. We encourage further research
that considers these questions in different or broader
populations, and that examines questions of the self-
presentational and relational negotiation of effort in other
digital media.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank our participants for taking part in our
study. We also want to thank our colleagues at Microsoft
Research’s Social Media Collective and University of
Michigan’s Social Media Research Lab for their help and
feedback.
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