Analyzing Netizen's View and Reply Behaviors on the Forum

TL;DR

This paper statistically analyzes user behaviors on a forum, revealing power law distributions in views and replies, nonlinear relationships, and universal properties in reply timing, with cultural differences influencing engagement patterns.

Contribution

It provides a quantitative analysis of forum user behaviors, uncovering power law distributions, nonlinear relationships, and universal temporal properties, which were not previously characterized.

Findings

Views and replies follow power law distributions with different exponents.

The relationship between views and replies is nonlinear, following a power function.

Reply timing exhibits burstiness and memory, showing universal properties across forums.

Abstract

Quantitative understanding of human behaviors provides elementary comprehension of the complexity of many human-initiated systems. In this paper, we investigate the behavior of people on the $BBS$ forum by the statistical analysis of the amounts of view and reply of posts. According to our statistics, we find that the amounts of view and reply of posts follow the power law distributions with different power exponent. Furthermore, we discover that the amounts of view and reply of posts have nonlinear relationship. They are related by power function and show us straight line in log-log plot. Based on the estimation of slope and intercept of the line, we can characterize the behaviors quantitatively and know that people of Chinese forum and those of foreign forum have different preference towards replying to and viewing the posts. At last, we analyze the burstiness and memory in replying time series. They show some universal properties among different forum. All of them locate themselves in the high-$B$, low-$M$ region.