2010/05/31 by A. Ratkiewicz, Jacob Ratkiewicz, Filippo Menczer +3 · 257 citations
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Computer science #Computer security #Data science #Dynamics (music) #Key (lock) #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Physics #Popularity #Psychology #Space (punctuation) #Statistical physics #Wikis in Education and Collaboration #cs.CY #cs.SI #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.105.158701
published in Physical Review Letters 105(15), 158701 (American Physical Society) · 5 pages, 4 figures. Modeling part detailed. Final version published in Physical Review Letters
openalex publication_date 2010/10/08 · arxiv created 2010/10/10 · arxiv updated 2015/03/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Online popularity has an enormous impact on opinions, culture, policy, and profits. We provide a quantitative, large scale, temporal analysis of the dynamics of online content popularity in two massive model systems: the Wikipedia and an entire country's Web space. We find that the dynamics of popularity are characterized by bursts, displaying characteristic features of critical systems such as fat-tailed distributions of magnitude and interevent time. We propose a minimal model combining the classic preferential popularity increase mechanism with the occurrence of random popularity shifts due to exogenous factors. The model recovers the critical features observed in the empirical analysis of the systems analyzed here, highlighting the key factors needed in the description of popularity dynamics.