Does the First Mover Advantage Exist on GitHub?
Aditya Mehta, Arun Paudyal, Atul Sharma, Zyanya Ambros, Ipek Baris,, Jun Sun, Oul Han, Akram Sadat Hosseini

TL;DR
This paper investigates whether first movers on GitHub gain lasting influence, finding early adopters tend to accumulate more followers, but social behaviors and aging effects can counteract this advantage.
Contribution
It introduces an empirical method to analyze influence dynamics on GitHub, highlighting the existence of early adopter advantages and the factors that can diminish this effect.
Findings
Early adopters tend to have more followers in the long run
Social networking behavior of late adopters can influence influence dynamics
Aging effects of repositories impact user influence over time
Abstract
Collaborative consensus-finding is an integral element of many Web services and greatly determines the quality of information, content, and products that are available through the Web. That also means that the dynamics of democratic consensus-finding strengthen collective resilience against potential threats that attempt to degrade information, content, and products and affect Web data, users, behaviors, and even beyond as well as offline life. Even on Web platforms that are open to all, the influence of some first mover authors may shape future discussion and collaboration, which is comparable to academic citation networks for instance. In a social coding network such as GitHub, activities of a set of users can have influence on other users who can get interested in further actions, possibly contributing to a new project together with influential users. In this paper, we analyze the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsComplex Network Analysis Techniques · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence · Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies
