The Faceless Vicinity: Who Uses Location-Based Anonymous Social Networks Like Jodel and Why?

Anonymous social networks, such as Jodel, are enjoying increasing popularity. But what are the reasons? At first, the connection of social networks, usually associated with exchanging and making contacts, and anonymity seems to be somehow contradictory. But as the user statistics of Jodel show, it works. This study explores the question of what exactly motivates people to use anonymous social networks like Jodel. For this purpose, different user roles, usage motivations, and gamification elements were examined by means of correlation and cluster analyses. To generate results for the evaluation a user survey with 874 participants was conducted, which was based among others on the Uses and Gratifications Theory by Blumler and Katz [ 1 ]. Following the classification by Shao [ 2 ], the participating users were divided into the user roles producer, commenter, rater, and consumer. The study shows that boredom and entertainment are among the most common usage reasons, while additional motivations are rather specific for each user role.