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Top1. Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic has catalyzed digital transformation for various traditional industries. To sustain operations, those used to rely on the offline channel are enforced to adopt online channels to distribute products or services. For example, schools provide online courses (Mehla et al., 2022), restaurants accommodate online orders and takeaways (Raj et al., 2021), and hospitals facilitate online treatment inquiries (Sun & Wang, 2021). However, it is less documented about what platforms that are native to the online channel have experienced during the pandemic (Basavaraj et al., 2021; Han et al., 2021; Raj et al., 2021). Such documentation is important as it offers valuable lessons to social entities of what to expect for such an unprecedented health crisis to prepare for the next (Reinhart, 2020).
Although it is natural to expect that online platforms should be less affected by the pandemic, the pandemic may incur unexpected side effects. For example, although online retailers are robust in sales, they have suffered from severe logistics congestion (Han et al., 2021); Although food delivery platforms receive more orders, their incumbent small restaurants have been exposed to more intense competition (Raj et al., 2021); Although gig platforms have absorbed non-gig labors, the inequality among gig workers of different social groups are aggravated (Basavaraj et al., 2021). To add knowledge to this line of research, this work documents the opportunities and challenges of the online question and answer community (Q&A community for short) during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Q&A community has been an important source from which people absorb knowledge. There, questioners (community members who ask questions) can learn from the responding answers, and respondents (community members who answer questions) can also absorb knowledge through peer respondents' answers (Jin et al., 2021; Stanko, 2016). The impact of the pandemic on the Q&A community is unclear. Intuitions may either suggest a positive effect as the offline channel of learning becomes restricted during the pandemic, or a negative one as people switch to more necessary and urgent issues (such as panic-buying) when their livelihoods are threatened in the hardship. Anyway, a convincible identification of this impact demands an empirical scrutinization. Moreover, the metrics to evaluate the Q&A community should be multidimensional. Aside from the community volume (e.g., number of questions and answers), the community responsiveness (e.g., response rate of questions) is equally vital because the latter greatly affects membership turnover (Butler, 2001; Butler & Wang, 2012). In addition, neither a volume growth (or decline) in questions nor in answers can, by itself, decide the way responsiveness change - rather, it should depend on how the volume of questions and answers relatively change (Butler, 2001; Butler & Wang, 2012). Therefore, a thorough understanding of the impact requires multifaceted analyses involving both community volume and responsiveness.
Then, a natural question is what drives the impacts of COVID-19 on community volume and responsiveness - such an in-depth exploration into the underlying mechanisms can be value-adding. First, the COVID-19 pandemic has devastated almost every aspect of daily life, entailing all-around disruption to people's lifestyles (Giuntella et al., 2021). We nominate and test one of these aspects, namely a prolonged time of staying at home to be the behavioral mechanism underlying the changes in community volume. Second, we propose an influx of new members, which may break the balance of volume in questions and answers, as an additional antecedence of the change in response rate. Altogether, we specify and manage to figure out the following research questions: What is the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the volume and responsiveness of the online Q&A community, and what are the behavioral mechanisms of the impact?