Jump on the Bandwagon? -- Characterizing Bandwagon Phenomenon in Online NBA Fan Communities

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the bandwagon phenomenon among NBA fans on Reddit, revealing patterns in user loyalty, behavior, and team attraction, and proposing methods to identify and predict bandwagon users effectively.

Contribution

It provides a large-scale characterization of bandwagon fans, analyzing their behavior, flow, and language, and introduces improved methods for identifying and predicting bandwagon behavior.

Findings

Better teams attract more bandwagon fans.

Bandwagon users write shorter comments but receive better feedback.

The proposed methods outperform baseline in predicting bandwagon behavior.

Abstract

Understanding user dynamics in online communities has become an active research topic and can provide valuable insights for human behavior analysis and community management. In this work, we investigate the "bandwagon fan" phenomenon, a special case of user dynamics, to provide a large-scale characterization of online fan loyalty in the context of professional sports teams. We leverage the existing structure of NBA-related discussion forums on Reddit, investigate the general bandwagon patterns, and trace the behavior of bandwagon fans to capture latent behavioral characteristics. We observe that better teams attract more bandwagon fans, but they do not necessarily come from weak teams. Our analysis of bandwagon fan flow also shows different trends for different teams, as the playoff season progresses. Furthermore, we compare bandwagon users with non-bandwagon users in terms of their activity and language usage. We find that bandwagon users write shorter comments but receive better feedback, and use words that show less attachment to their affiliated teams. Our observations allow for more effective identification of bandwagon users and prediction of users' future bandwagon behavior in a season, as demonstrated by the significant improvement over the baseline method in our evaluation results.