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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?
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.
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 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.
I guess you disagree with the author. Otherwise you would have provided a link...
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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? --
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Good luck in explaining the spike in traffic 3 full days after the article was posted.
Suckers!
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
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.
And is recycled back to the the top.
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); }
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.
Physics is the science of nature, and I don't think human nature is included.
I don't want to read
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?
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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.
Current tags: boring, slownewsday, yawn, uninteresting and duh.
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