Slashdot Mirror
Physicists Find Users Uninterested After 36 Hours
SuperGrads writes "Statistical physicists working in the US and Hungary have found that the number of people reading a particular news story on the web decreases with time by a power law rather than exponentially as was previously thought. The finding has implications for the study of information flow in social networks, marketing and web design."
Users Find Physicists Uninteresting After 3.6 seconds.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Are we still talking about this?
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
The story will get posted again on slashdot 37 hours later.
I'm wondering if these same researches tried to define what their subjects defined as "news"? If something was newsworthy, I'm guessing they likely found out about it over time. Maybe the people didn't read it because they were informed from other sources?
Sounds like a bit of a flawed evaluation to me.
I'll create an amusing sig when I have something meaningful to post.
Please reread your own sig.
Users losing interest in this particular news story follow an impulse function.
'nuff said.
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
Actually, nobody cares about this sort of thing, and these so-called "statistical physicists" would all be cleaning gutters for a living right now.. except the guy from HR is too terrified to go downstairs and fire them. The last time he tried, they somehow irrevocably proved to him that not only was it statistically impossible that he had arrived to give them their pink slips, but they also proved his trousers, eyebrows, and cat out of existence with nothing more than a slide rule and a whiteboard.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
One of the authors, Albert-László Barabási, is also the author of a book I really enjoyed Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means
as it is that information on the internet changes and updates instantly. It's not that people aren't interested in it as it just gets buried with new news. An article posted 10 minutes ago is now old news. Even on here. I work until 11pm. I come home and scroll down to see if I missed anything good. So between 2:00 when I go to work and 11:30 when I get home there's already at least 10 new stories. Imagine, now, what official news sites are like.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
Local man becomes bored easily reading stories about nothing.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Most news becomes old hat within a day and a half of being posted...
Which is where sites like slashdot come into play. Thanks to the dutiful work of the editors, stories that are weeks, months, and sometimes even years old, are often given a new lease on life.
This guy's the limit!
What does behavioural analysis have to do with physics?
One has to wonder how the site's story policy affects the drop-off. That is, is the drop-off because users are uninterested or not reading, or is it because after that time the story drops off the main pages and becomes hard to find to read?
From the article: "7 July 2006"
Yup... way to stay on top of things.
People have short attention spans...
15 second sound bite at eleven!
... when there are NO interesting news to post on Slashdot :(
You can read about the breaking news today on the internet.
/. 8^D.
Or you can hear about it tonight on the news (or Leno/Conan/Daily Show).
Or you can wait till tomorrow and read it in the paper.
So, 36 hours seems a little generous, but I guess sometimes people get too busy to check
36 Hours is the exact age of a story before it drops from the bottom of slashdot's Main page.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
PHYSICISTS REPORT ARTICLES NOT ON FRONT PAGE READ LESS
ALSO NOTE THAT SITES HAVE FINITE NUMBERS OF USERS
And nothing about 'uninterested users'. This implies that, well, a reader is not likely to read an article more than once. Shocking, much unlike the answer to the question who is funding these people?
My problem with spontaneous human combustion is that never seems to happen to the "right" people.
I mean, DUH. Who the hell is paying these guys?
...will be barely read by anyone 36 hours after it was first posted
An amazing bit of research; only out by 36 hours.
"Barabasi's team calculated the "half-life" of a news document, which corresponds to the period in which half of all visitors that eventually access it have visited. The researchers found that the overall half-life distribution follows a power law, which indicates that most news items have a very short lifetime, although a few continue to be accessed well beyond this period. The average half-life of a news item is just 36 hours, or one and a half days after it is released. While this is short, it is longer than predicted by simple exponential models, which assume that web page browsing is less random than it actually is."
The half-life (not the game, duh) of a news article is 36 hours. People still continue to be interested beyond that. As an advertiser, I'd be more interested in the 70% life. That time when 70% of the people that will look at it *have* looked at it. I would guess that is closer to four days.
Layne
Users found uninteresting in about .036 seconds...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
This is why badnews in politics is always released late on friday. By Monday, everyone has ignored it.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
If only you would have waited 35.5 more hours, we could have proved the articals facts true or false
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
No mathematical function can model my loss of interest rate while visiting myspace, youtube..etc. Physicists suck. LOL!!!!!1111
Right?
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Good luck in explaining the spike in traffic 3 full days after the article was posted.
Suckers!
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I wonder how the ratings would differ if they studied the Fort Worth Star Telegram web site. Click on News and you see THIS WEEK'S MOST READ plus the most read for each of the last 6 months.
I betcha those older articles get more than a few eyeballs.
1. If you go on vacation, and spend the usual two to four weeks relaxing, ignoring all the news except maybe browsing the headlines one day a week, as I frequently do, does the news not have equal importance? In other words, perhaps most of what we call "news" is temporary by nature, and grows less relevant with the passage of time. Please note this doesn't relate to medical/health/science news, as I've read many scientific papers from years ago that are just as relevant today as they were then. Also, for those in the US and Japan, yes, the world understands you don't get much vacation, but that's your problem.
2. How much of the news is what we call 'entertainment' news? How much is 'sports' news? Such news quickly ceases to have relevance, other than to fans of both media.
3. Perhaps the lack of investigative journalism, the lack of crafting of news into stories that take days to write, has led to the current situation where news quickly becomes staledated? I've read many an old copy of The New Yorker, and most of the stories about news are still relevant today, maybe one-fourth becoming less so due to the passage of time. Consider the skill and the medium used.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Let me guess. You're from Soviet Russia, yes?
...to be studying this sort of thing. In any subject where the laws of Physics apply, physicists are very well suited to look at the data. Since humans are so prone to actions that defy any logic or reason, a behavioral psychologist would be better suited to have an opinion. Let's pose this question back to Steven Hawking.
Being so smart and everything, you'd think they would have bothered to check how many new articles usually appear on Slashdot in a 36 hour period. I once tried running an RSS feed reader for a while with links to only a few sites, but quickly became so inundated with interesting stories to read that I was soon wasting way too much time. Living in this Internet, information society, immersed in so much new data every day, it's almost as easy to forget it all again; that's why advertisers keep hammering at you every time you turn on your TV. I only remember more of it when the subject matter is relevant to my work or other interests. The physics stuff is always interesting, but I'm not a researcher in that field and it's probably not going to result in any new products for me to buy any time soon either. What's more, most of my friends aren't interested in that stuff, so I don't even get to discuss it with anyone -- i.e. next...
I just thought this was funny.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Silly me, I thought that the word news contained the word new, meaning that it isn't news if it isn't new. I am glad that a team of scientists was able to study this coorelation.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Color me ignorant, but I thought exponentials and powers were the same thing?
Or are they talking about natural exp -vs- a higher order power, like 4 or 5?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
...find it strange that we have physicists doing research about news story lifespans? How is this relevant to physics?
"To get a fuller understanding of such networks, Barabási and colleagues decided to study the visiting patterns on a popular Hungarian news and entertainment portal..."
I didn't know that popular Hungarian sites existed.
That's the first flaw in this study. They need a better cross-section of sites, preferably not popular Hungarian sites...
My interest in the article decreased quite powerfully as I read the opening paragraph!
Missing blond females seem to stay in the news a lot longer than 36 hours. Most of the advertising revenue of the cable news networks is based on blond female becoming missing. Fox News, CNN and MSNBC would be reduced to covering real news if it weren't for them. I wouldn't be surprised if most weren't missing due to a conspiracy of cable news producers preying on them. They all those news vans just sitting around.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
The article says the equation to describe how interest in a news story drops off over time is not as is expected. But there are no equations in the story. They do not have an equation for the old model or for the new model for how interest in a story drops off!
This is just lame reporting of science news.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
Lets see..."If you think you're reading the news, be warned that this story -- and any other on the web -- will be barely read by anyone 36 hours after it was first posted. [*yawn*] That's the message from a team of statistical physicists who have analysed how people access information online. [*scratch*] Albert-László..."...huh? Pay attention to what now?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Physics is the science of nature, and I don't think human nature is included.
I don't want to read
I'm sorry... you lost me somewhere around "Statistical physicists"...
# man tar
Physicists find users uninteresting after 36 hours
read it carefully, it's what i thought the title was, not was it is.
-Tim Louden
This trend depends on user browsing patterns rather than content, but also depends on users allowing cookies to live for not only longer than one browsing session, but for a full month.
Thus, much like that classic problem of proving the external validity of any research done by a college psych department on their own undergrads (which usually results in 80-90% female and at least half freshman participants), this study has a pretty glaring flaw - It only really says anything about MSIE users (and even then, only MSIE users dumb enough not to use some form of cookie management) rather than users in general. While that almost certainly includes the majority of visitors to many sites, it doesn't safely extend to the larger population of all web surfers.
Additionally, I would point out one more glaring source of error... It fails to normalize each unit of time against the remaining base of users - So, for example, if 90% of the regular visitors to a site see an article within an hour of posting, that leaves only 10% (plus the negligibly-small number that re-read the same article over and over, except on Slashdot where you can use FP refreshes as a solid measure of workday boredom). That, IMO, says far more about how long the typical (MSIE-qualified as above) user can go without a news fix, rather than how long an article remains interesting.
I can see these physicists really scratching their heads when the article gets slashdotted 72 hours after the published date (July 7).
Any rate that decays continuously with a half-life can be described by a function of the form C*e^(-kt) where t is time, C is the initial rate (at t = 0), and the constant k = ln(2)/(half life), with half-life measured in the same units as time.
A power law relationship is something of the form y = A*t^k, which cannot be used to model a rate with a half life, since the time to reduce the rate by half depends on where you start, and increases as time increases.
Also any exponential function (with negative k) eventually decays faster than any power law function. The power law can start decaying faster, but since the half life will increase with time, the exponential function with a constant half-life will always eventually get under it. (L'Hospital's rule is your friend.)
So to say that something that can be described with a half life follows a power law rather than a exponential function, and decays faster than an exponential function, indicates a complete ignorance of the methematical terms. This also calls into question the validity of everything else the article says.
If you read the article, it says the distribution of half-lives of stories decreases as a power law, not that hit rates on stories decrease as a power law.
Half lives are a measurement of exponential decay. Individual stories still decrease in hits exponentially over time. If you look at lots of stories, the decays are distributed according to a power law.
The article directly contradicts the Slasdot summary.
Hits on stories do decrease exponentially.
I am stunned that I am the only one so far who seems to have picked up on this. Did anyone actually read the article, or did they just read into it what they were told they would see?
---
Albert-László Barabási is a tenured endowed professorship at Notre Dame. I don't think he's one step away from cleaning gutters.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
In related news, 1iar_parad0x has just taken on an associate professorship at the University of Joke-Missing.
Research shows that the moron who tagged this as redundant was too stupid to get the metajoke, or to notice it had been the third post, hardly redundant. But at least you won't get to vote for Bush again, so I'm okay with this. Now if only you would stop breeding. Will insecticide work?
from the end of tfa:
"How the priors are themselves constructed in the mind has yet to be investigated in detail. Obviously they are learned by experience, but the exact process is not properly understood. Indeed, some people suspect that the parsimony of Bayesian reasoning leads occasionally to it going spectacularly awry, with whatever process it is that forms the priors getting further and further off-track rather than converging on the correct distribution.
That might explain the emergence of superstitious behaviour, with an accidental correlation or two being misinterpreted by the brain as causal. A frequentist way of doing things would reduce the risk of that happening. But by the time the frequentist had enough data to draw a conclusion, he might already be dead."
i'm intrigued by the idea that otherwise sane people insist on believing stupid stuff because that's how their brain 'is designed to work', if a brain is hardwired to these types of judgements then it's no surprise that apparently obvious 'frequentist' arguments don't work sometimes.
I do wonder whether the authors really "expected" the distribution of the numbers of readers to be exponential ... I only follow this literature for curiosity's sake, but even so I've read quite a few papers lately finding power law distributions in various human communication networks (emails, letters, social groups), social animal groups, etc. The results describing power laws in various cuts of the Internet are also very well known. As some of the studies suggest, power laws arise in "bursty" communications, when the items involved are held in a queue, which organised by priority. For instance, if you respond to emails from a few special people very promptly, handle those from most others with a bit more proscrastination, and shelve a few for a very long time, the wait times between your communications will follow a power law.
;)
In short, I bet that people working in the field would by now consider a power law the reasonable first hypothesis, when investigating a phenomenon of this sort. The mention of the refuted expected exponential is a bit of gentle scientific sensationalism.
"I am just a customs officer; but I, too, wish to understand what is going on" -- Bertold Brecht
How interest in news items evolves over time, how it depends on communication, links, and recommendations, has been the subject of research for decades. E-commerce sites use detailed models of this in order to determine when to remove items from the front page.
It is true that many people use exponential decay models, but that's not because they don't know any better, it's because exponential decay is computationally simple and works well enough. It's like using a linear approximation to a non-linear problem.
I think it's pretty telling that Barabási is publishing this in physics journals, not in statistics or web-related publications. This may be news to physicists, but it isn't news to anybody who actually works in the field and knows their stuff. The reviewers at Phys. rev. simply aren't qualified to determine whether this kind of work is novel and correct.
They needed all that infrastructure to disprove trousers? Heck, I can do that to myself with just a few shots of tequila. ;)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
welcome our statistically insignificant overlords -- for the next 36 hours or so I guess.
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
Actually..... I care about it. Without being a physicist. A lot more than I care which special offers are available at which department store for this and the next week.
Any time I've posted a comment on Slashdot that included a link to my band's web site, I see an immediate spike in hits in the logs shortly after the comment is posted, followed by the same magnitude decrease they talk about in the article. What I haven't done is tried to correlate the max mod level of the comment with the height of the spike, or the rate of decrease in hits. Might be interesting to play with the #s some rainy Sunday.
:-)
(I'm posting AC so as to not be a TOTAL shill
Power law: 1^2, 2^2, 3^2, 4^2, 5^2...
Exponential: 5, 5^2, 5^3, 5^4, 5^5...
Big difference in the growth after a short period.
... I hope I am not reading this at the wrong time. I wouldn't want to be in violation of the power law.
That these "statistical physicists" are really just "social scientists" who have worked out that everyone has twigged that "social science" is not scientific at all and are looking for renewed credibility.
(Speaking as a physicist)
"Thanks to automatically assigned "cookies", the scientists were able to reconstruct the browsing history of about 250,000 visitors to the site over the course of a month."
Did they have enough controls in place to ensure the cookies were accurate representations of user's tastes?
Blocking cookies, for political privacy and other reasons, is common nowadays.
Did they ensure that the cookies they saw were the ones they baked, by adding SHA-256 (a data preservative)?
Did they make sure that the visitors without cookies had not visited before and stolen their cookies?
I love the guy who tagged this article 'duh', as though it were somehow obvious a priori that user interest in news stories falls off with time by a power law instead an exponential law. He certainly must be a genius.
I was ready to tear this study apart the way Slashdot put it
'The finding has implications for the study of information flow in spyware marketing...'
Advertising today has gone to the dogs but this study meets logic and is up to academic standards,
"Such quantitative approaches to online media not only offer a better understanding of information access, but could have important commercial applications as well - from better portal design to understanding information diffusion, flow, and marketing in the online world," say the researchers.
When a spyware maker opens his heart and mind to show the world how his research is going I lose interest before I have it. We need more research on helping PEOPLE have a better experience not how to exploit them
I got bored by time I reached "pink slips". Next time, could you put the punch line at the beginning so I can decide whether or not it's worth reading the rest of your comment. Thanks.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
With "exponential" just a special case with the base being e?
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
... I didn't RTFA... well, not all of it anyway.
Libertas in infinitum
Current tags: boring, slownewsday, yawn, uninteresting and duh.
Put another way: Slashdot -- Now with 20% real nerds!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
and the one 3, 6, & 9 days after that when the dupes comes through...
Sheesh. Must be American - god we're a stupid, stupid country. And I quote: "If you think you're reading the news, be warned that this story -- and any other on the web -- will be barely read by anyone 36 hours after it was first posted." Oh wow! How exciting! Hardly anyone reads a story 36 hours after it's posted. "Barabasi's team calculated the "half-life" of a news document, which corresponds to the period in which half of all visitors that eventually access it have visited." Huh? Fully HALF the readers of the story come after 36 hours???? Belle Dumé must be yet another child that was left behind.
There is an easy answer: read online posts after 36 hours. That way the advirtisers will have pulled their ads!
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
'If it bleeds, it leads'
:) No, I won't reveal where and how to get it because I don't want to Slashdot the source and drive up their bandwidth bill and you have to 'jump through hoops' to get the MP3 itself anyway.
:) Maybe that's the ultimate reason why there was the push in the U.S. to adopt 'digital TV' and dump the current analog model...it would obsolete incompatible analog VCRs and 'enforce' ad viewing/DRM with certain 'broadcast flags' when recorded/played back with approved PVRs... :P
A tired old newsmedia saying imortalized by Kelsey Grammer's Robert Hawkins in 15 MINUTES proves that nothing drives ratings up like death and misfortune.
Just look at just 3 historical events to generate 'wall to wall' coverage...
The President Kennedy Assasinaton (1963-11-22)
The Challenger disaster (1986-01-28)
and of course
9/11 (2001-09-11)
I've only seen snippets of the Kennedy Assasination coverage on TV mostly from archival footage so I can't comment.
For the Challenger disaster I happened on to it one day while running an errand. Truly a national tragedy shared by (seemingly) the entire US population thanks to nonstop coverage by CNN who got 'the scoop of the century' by still covering Space Shuttle launches after the 'big 3' networks gave it up to dish out more 'mass media entertainment'. The drawback, if it could be said of it, was that the CNN coverage that day was highly repetitive but I guess it was designed that way to accommodate people watching at different times of the day.
The same thing could be said for 9/11 coverage that day -- repetitive and somber. The thing that stuck out in my mind was that the 'big 3' networks became 'little CNNs' with around the clock news coverage for a few days afterward with NO commercial breaks at all (surely at great expense) - just the usual station identification stuff and on-screen 'watermarking' (which I hate but understand is necessary in an ad-soaked visual mass media like broadcast television).
Anyway, this kind of media coverage gives the average viewer a carthartic, detached, reassuring 'glad it wasn't me' kind of feeling. I don't know if that is ultimately good or bad but it does fuel ratings and drive/generate ad revenue for the networks.
Ultimately, it's all about the eyeballs and how much cash to extract from their owners in exchange for goods and services.... Just look at how assinine and silly commercials have become lately. The best of the bunch right now to me is the (in)famous Avis XM Satellite Radio TV commercial with 3 guys in the car lip-syncing to a rap song which I was able to find via GOOGLE - it was a bit difficult to get the MP3 of the song but I got it!
Thank goodness for the VCR. I use it regularly to watch shows and zip past the ads for stuff I am eminently not interested in or have seen already. You can save around 15-20 minutes an hour watching previously recorded broadcast TV shows by bypassing the ads - you aren't missing much if most/nearly all the ads they show on TV do not interest you. If they ever make PVRs unable to fast forward/rewind to skip ads at least VCRs will be around for awhile in spite of their inferior sound and picture quality when compared to PVRs...
Commercials, as wasteful and scattershot they are are the price one pay to get 'free television' in the U.S. The better, more expensive UK model would never work in the US - people would either 'go without' or 'cheat the system' to get their TV fix. Case in point: Who watches PBS programming during 'pledge drive' time then turn away/fast forward (previously recorded material) to avoid the pledge breaks interspersed within like 'standard' commercials. Just about 'everybody' I gather. But the nice thing about PBS is you get content that is pretty close to the advertized run time like hour-long