2021/12/22 by Evan Weissburg, Arya Kumar, Weissburg, Evan +4 · 2 citations
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) #cs.SI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2112.12191
11 pages. Accepted for publication at ICWSM 2022
arxiv created 2021/12/22 · openalex publication_date 2021/12/22 · arxiv updated 2021/12/24 · openalex created_date 2022/05/05 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Several factors influence the popularity of content on social media, including the what, when, and who of a post. Of these factors, the what and when of content are easiest to customize in order to maximize viewership and reach. Further, the title of a post (part of the what) is the easiest to tailor, compared to the post's body, which is often fixed. So, in this paper, we assess the impact of a post's title on its popularity while controlling for the time of posting (the when) by proposing an interpretable attention-based model. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in predicting the popularity of posts on multiple online communities of various sizes, topics, and formats while still being parsimonious. Interpretation of our model's attention weights sheds light on the heterogeneous patterns in how the specific words in a post's title shape its popularity across different communities. Our results highlight the power of sentiment alignment, personal storytelling, and even personality politics in propelling content to virality.