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."
It might also be relevant that this study was done only on a Hungarian news site. It's possible there would be different results in other countries due to cultural differences and the number of available news sources.
Developers: We can use your help.
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?
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.
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); }
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?
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