Feedback loops of attention in peer production

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how attention feedback loops in online peer production platforms incentivize active contributors to produce more content, leading to power-law distributions in contribution levels.

Contribution

It reveals the feedback mechanism where attention attracts more contributions, explaining the power-law distribution in user activity on content sharing sites.

Findings

Active users receive more attention, encouraging continued participation.

Prolific contributors attract more followers and attention over time.

The observed distribution of contributions follows a power law.

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 continuing 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.