Buffering Content

Description
This pattern occurs when the user has a lot of information to share. One aspect is when the user is concerned about the recievers of the content by not wanting to upset them through a massive flow of content. Another aspect is when users try to post at regular time intervals. In both cases the result is that the user stockpiles information in order to either distribute it evenly over time or combine it into one larger content item.

Examples
One example is when a user feels that the day has been very eventful and wants to share these events with friends. Instead of sharing content every time something noticable appears during the day, the user keeps them in mind until the day is almost over and then shares only one (larger) piece of content including all, or most, of the information. This will prevent the readers from ignoring some information due to a massive incoming stream of content. By acting this way the user keeps up a good appearance or even keep Maintaining A Facade.

One example where the system handles this kind of nuisance is one of Facebook (September 2011). If similar content are shared during the same time period it will aggregate the content with the option to expand the view to display all current content (September 2011).



Letting other users comment on the frequency of sharing of a certain user could act as an counterpart for this behavior.

Another exaple comes from the blogsphere: Here, bloggers may want to keep updating their blog on a reular basis, e.g. weekly. A strategy to maintain this regularity is to keep a few posts "in stock" to counter for things like lack of time or inspiration, vacation etc.

Pros and Cons
This dynamic occurs as a means of controlling content. An advantage is that content, that might otherwise be forgotten or neglected in competition with other seemingly more interesting content, will get attention too. As for combining small chunks into one large piece of information, this is not inherently good or bad; it depends on how relevant the information is for the readers, and how well it is presented. As for the blog-case, Buffering Content opens up for Crafting Content in that buffered posts are probably of a better quality, than ones thrown together just for the sake of it.

Relations
This pattern comes from the act of Sharing (Crumlish & Malone) or more specifically a kind of Public Sharing (Crumlish & Malone) that is also an Ongoing Sharing (Crumlish & Malone). This is a pattern where the opinion of other users affects the behavior of a user and is therefore a type of Self Censoring. If a user is sharing a large amount of content it might cause annoyment with other users and thetermpapers.net provides detailed explanation on the action schemes and what is to be avoid not to cause annoyment.

Mechanics that allow the user to perform as many posts as they want and no mechanism that would aggregate these posts for the user's friends would benefit the original behavior.

Contributors
Created by Magnus Spånggård from the inspiration of Patric Westberg who also revised this article.