The Stength of Weak cooperation: A Case Study on Flickr

TL;DR

This paper examines how weak cooperation among millions of Flickr users creates rich, structured data, highlighting user interactions, quality control procedures, and analyzing a large dataset of photos and users.

Contribution

It provides an in-depth case study of Flickr, illustrating the properties of weak cooperation and analyzing a large-scale dataset to understand user interactions and content quality.

Findings

Large-scale user contributions enable rich content creation.

Interaction between small and heavy users influences content quality.

Flickr's procedures effectively manage content selection.

Abstract

Web 2.0 works with the principle of weak cooperation, where a huge amount of individual contributions build solid and structured sources of data. In this paper, we detail the main properties of this weak cooperation by illustrating them on the photo publication website Flickr, showing the variety of uses producing a rich content and the various procedures devised by Flickr users themselves to select quality. We underlined the interaction between small and heavy users as a specific form of collective production in large social networks communities. We also give the main statistics on the (5M-users, 150M-photos) data basis we worked on for this study, collected from Flickr website using the public API.