Title
Collective attention patterns under controlled conditions.
Abstract
Increasing concerns over widespread manipulation have led to an examination of how the direct promotion of content affects user behavior. Several studies have hypothesized that promotions exert their effects through a combination of social influence and attention redirection that are presently not well understood. The particulars of the promotion mechanism itself, however, might play an important role. Here we focus on a particular type of promotion mechanism: one that promotes identical content for the entire community of users. Through a large-scale analysis of Wikipedia page-views we show that fundamentally different processes underpin the longitudinal dynamics of user attention and preferences on Wikipedia compared to other promotion systems. Whereas other platforms follow history dependent processes, we found that the effects of community-wide promotions can be modeled using a history independent process. These findings allow to effectively compare view dynamics across online services.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1016/j.osnem.2019.07.003
Online Social Networks and Media
Keywords
Field
DocType
Wikipedia,Activity dynamics,Popularity modeling
Cognitive psychology,Psychology,Social influence
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
13
2468-6964
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marijn ten Thij100.34
Andreas Kaltenbrunner261350.64
David Laniado325020.17
Yana Volkovich420717.71