While knowledge visibility has emerged as a defining characteristic of social media platforms that critically affects user behavior and community operations, scholarly attention to its specific mechanisms within online health communities (OHCs) remains notably absent. This study seeks to fill this gap by examining how the visibility of health knowledge influences users’ continuous use intention of OHCs, while also exploring the contingent influence of individuals’ prosocial tendencies.
Drawing on the social cognitive theory (SCT), we develop a research model to examine how OHCs’ knowledge visibility shapes individuals’ continuous use intention by influencing their cognitive mechanism. Using empirical data from 556 OHC user surveys, we employed multivariate regression analyses to unravel the relationship between visibility and user behavior.
The results reveal that the visibility of health knowledge positively influences both outcome expectations and self-efficacy, which in turn positively affect the continuous use of OHCs. Prosocial tendency negatively impacts the relationship between the visibility of health knowledge and self-efficacy, while exhibiting no significant influence on the link between the visibility of health knowledge and outcome expectations.
This study systematically examines the dynamics of knowledge visibility in OHCs, shedding light on the overlooked connections between informational accessibility and sustained platform engagement. The empirical evidence provides new insights into engagement drivers while proposing evidence-based strategies for optimizing OHC information architectures.
