2018/03/22 by Tianran Hu, Jiebo Luo, Hu, Tianran +3
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis #Opportunistic and Delay-Tolerant Networks #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) #cs.CY #cs.SI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1803.08251
To appear at The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) 2018
arxiv created 2018/03/22 · openalex publication_date 2018/03/22 · arxiv updated 2018/03/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
With the wide adoption of the multi-community setting in many popular social media platforms, the increasing user engagements across multiple online communities warrant research attention. In this paper, we introduce a novel analogy between the movements in the cyber space and the physical space. This analogy implies a new way of studying human online activities by modelling the activities across online communities in a similar fashion as the movements among locations. First, we quantitatively validate the analogy by comparing several important properties of human online activities and physical movements. Our experiments reveal striking similarities between the cyber space and the physical space. Next, inspired by the established methodology on human mobility in the physical space, we propose a framework to study human "mobility" across online platforms. We discover three interesting patterns of user engagements in online communities. Furthermore, our experiments indicate that people with different mobility patterns also exhibit divergent preferences to online communities. This work not only attempts to achieve a better understanding of human online activities, but also intends to open a promising research direction with rich implications and applications.