Conclusions
RECRUITMENT
This randomized clinical trial may enhance understanding of novel viral recruitment methods and recommender systems for smoking cessation. Our results suggest that viral recruitment may be beneficial not only for spreading the intervention, but also for motivating smokers to quit smoking. This may open new opportunities to design digital interventions for smoking cessation as team efforts and build collaborative tools for people who smoke to not only refer, but also engage with one another throughout the intervention. Our results further suggest that through digital methods, we may have the potential to reach a larger proportion of individuals with effective methods, resulting in a greater impact. Although the recommender system in this study did not outperform the standard messaging system, the benefit of the system’s ability to continuously learn from its users may be best realized in a large and long-term implementation in which the system has sufficient duration to collect substantial amounts of feedback data.