The Hidden Geometry of Attention Diffusion

TL;DR

This paper introduces a geometric model of attention diffusion in online communities, revealing how attention spreads and decays over time, and predicting click growth patterns related to user activity.

Contribution

It presents a novel geometric framework to quantify attention dynamics and explains the decay and growth patterns of attention in online platforms.

Findings

Attention diffusion forms time-invariant fields centered on input sources.

Old information moves outward and receives fewer clicks over time.

The model predicts accelerating click growth with increasing user activity.

Abstract

We propose a geometric model to quantify the dynamics of attention in online communities. Using clicks as a proxy of attention, we find that the diffusion of collective attention in Web forums and news sharing sites forms time-invariant "fields" whose density vary solely with distance from the center of the fields that represents the input of attention from the physical world. As time goes by, old information pieces are pushed farther from the center by new pieces, receive fewer and fewer clicks, and eventually become invisible in the virtual world. The discovered "attention fields" not only explain the fast decay of attention to information pieces, but also predict the accelerating growth of clicks against the active user population, which is a universal pattern relevant to the economics of scales of online interactions.