Jump on the Bandwagon? -- Characterizing Bandwagon Phenomenon in Online NBA Fan Communities
Yichen Wang, Jason Shuo Zhang, Xu Han, Qin Lv

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…
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