Feedback Loops of Attention in Peer Production

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 activeand devoted users, whose continuing participation is key to thesites’ 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 offollowers 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.

• Publication year

  2009

• Venue

  2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering

• Publication date

  2009-05-11

• Fields of study

  Physics, Computer Science, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1109/CSE.2009.430arXiv 0905.1740
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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