Persistence, reversal, and a steady-regime paradox in the testimonial weight of VR-referencing reviews: museum-year evidence from TripAdvisor

Whether VR heritage engagement builds or erodes has been assumed rather than estimated. Turning to public testimony, this study traces the testimonial weight of VR-referencing reviews (TWV), a museum-year composite of reviewers’ contribution stock, review length and reader endorsement, across 123 TripAdvisor museums advertising VR (2012–2023). Stimulus-organism-response, engagement-lifecycle, and field theories pair four discourse variables as credits and draws on experience-side and signal-side channels. System GMM shows TWV persisting at the first annual lag and reversing at the second, a pattern robust to alternative estimators, year effects and measurement overlap. A Steady-Regime Paradox, predicting steeper slopes at history-and-heritage museums, holds for discourse valence and exhibition-attribute density but is unsupported for community momentum and rating divergence, suggesting amplification lies in testimonial content, not reviewer populations. It offers a falsifiable, non-monotone account of platform-mediated testimony, with schedulable guidance on interpretive density and content renewal.