Identification and impact of discoverers in online social systems.
Understanding the behavior of users in online systems is of essential importance for sociology, system design, e-commerce, and beyond. Most existing models assume that individuals in diverse systems, ranging from social networks to e-commerce platforms, tend to what is already popular. We propose a statistical time-aware framework to identify the users who differ from the usual behavior by being repeatedly and persistently among the first to collect the items that later become hugely popular. Since these users effectively discover future hits, we refer them as discoverers. We use the proposed framework to demonstrate that discoverers are present in a wide range of real systems. Once identified, discoverers can be used to predict the future success of new items. We finally introduce a simple network model which reproduces the discovery patterns observed in the real data. Our results open the door to quantitative study of detailed temporal patterns in social systems.
Department of Physics, University of Fribourg, Chemin du Musée 3, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland.
Matúš
M
Medo
Department of Physics, University of Fribourg, Chemin du Musée 3, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland.
Manuel S
MS
Mariani
Department of Physics, University of Fribourg, Chemin du Musée 3, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland.|School of Systems Science, Beijing Normal University, 100875 Beijing, P.R. China.
An
A
Zeng
Department of Physics, University of Fribourg, Chemin du Musée 3, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland.
Yi-Cheng
YC
Zhang
Phys Rev Lett. 2011 Dec 2;107(23):238701
22182132
Science. 2009 Jul 24;325(5939):412-3
19628854
Phys Rev Lett. 2002 Dec 16;89(25):258702
12484927
Phys Rev Lett. 2013 Jan 11;110(2):028701
23383947
Science. 1999 Oct 15;286(5439):509-12
10521342
Science. 2012 Jul 20;337(6092):337-41
22722253
Science. 2013 Oct 4;342(6154):127-32
24092745
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 Sep 16;105(37):13724-9
18779560
Science. 2009 Feb 6;323(5915):721-3
19197046
Nature. 2012 Sep 27;489(7417):537-40
22972194
Science. 2013 Aug 9;341(6146):647-51
23929980
Science. 2006 Feb 10;311(5762):854-6
16469928
Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2014 Mar;89(3):032801
24730893
Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2007 Oct;76(4 Pt 2):046115
17995068
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2002 Oct 15;99(21):13382-6
12368484
Phys Rev E Stat Phys Plasmas Fluids Relat Interdiscip Topics. 2000 Aug;62(2 Pt A):1842-5
11088645