[p2p-research] Complexity Digest on Peer Production

[Ryan Lanham]

Feedback loops of attention in peer production , arXiv

Abstract: A significant percentage of online content is now published and
consumed via the mechanism of crowdsourcing. While any user can contribute
to these forums, a disproportionately large percentage of the content is
submitted by very active and devoted users, whose con- tinuing
participation is key to the sites' success. As we show, people's
propensity to keep participating increases the more they contribute,
suggesting motivating factors which increase over time. This paper
demonstrates that submitters who stop receiving attention tend to stop
contributing, while prolific contributors attract an ever increasing
number of followers and their attention in a feedback loop. We demonstrate
that this mechanism leads to the observed power law in the number of
contributions per user and support our assertions by an analysis of
hundreds of millions of contributions to top content sharing websites
Digg.com and Youtube.com.

* [27] Feedback loops of attention in peer production, Fang Wu, Dennis
M. Wilkinson and Bernardo A. Huberman, 2009/05/12, arXiv:0905.1740
http://uk.arXiv.org/abs/0905.1740 <http://uk.arxiv.org/abs/0905.1740>



Ryan Lanham
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