Feedback Loops of Attention in Peer Production

18 Pages Posted: 18 May 2009

See all articles by Fang Wu

Fang Wu

University of Texas at Dallas

Dennis Wilkinson

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Bernardo A. Huberman

CableLabs

Date Written: May 12, 2009

Abstract

A significant percentage of online content is now published and consumed via the mechanism of crowdsourcing. While any user can contribute to these forums, a disproportionately large percentage of the content is submitted by very active and devoted users, whose continuing participation is key to the sites' success. As we show, people's propensity to keep participating increases the more they contribute, suggesting motivating factors which increase over time. This paper demonstrates that submitters who stop receiving attention tend to stop contributing, while prolific contributors attract an ever increasing number of followers and their attention in a feedback loop. We demonstrate that this mechanism leads to the observed power law in the number of contributions per user and support our assertions by an analysis of hundreds of millions of contributions to top content sharing websites.

Keywords: attention economies, peer production

JEL Classification: C92, D70, D83, M37

Suggested Citation

Wu, Fang and Wilkinson, Dennis and Huberman, Bernardo A., Feedback Loops of Attention in Peer Production (May 12, 2009). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1403417 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1403417

Fang Wu

University of Texas at Dallas ( email )

2601 North Floyd Road
Richardson, TX 75083
United States

Dennis Wilkinson

affiliation not provided to SSRN ( email )

Bernardo A. Huberman (Contact Author)

CableLabs ( email )

400 W California Ave
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
United States

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