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Online Social Networks Can Be Tipped By Less Than 1% of Their Population
An anonymous reader writes "A new algorithm developed by researchers at West Point seems to break new ground for viral marketing practices in online social networks. Assuming a trend or behavior that spreads in an online social network based on the classic 'tipping' model from sociology (based on the work of Thomas Schelling and Mark Granovetter), the new West Point algorithm can find a set of individuals in the network that can initiate a social cascade – a progressive series of 'tipping' incidents — which leads to everyone in the social network adopting the new behavior. The good news for viral marketers is that this set of individuals is often very small – a sample of the Friendster social network can be influenced when only 0.8% of the initial population is seeded. The trick is finding the seed set. The algorithm is described in a paper to be presented later this summer at the prestigious IEEE ASONAM conference."
a sample of the Friendster social network can be influenced when only 0.8% of the initial population is seeded.
Friendster? Wow, you could influence, like, 300 people!
Any chance they're just witnessing C&C nodes transmitting spam orders or pagerank gaming links to the remaining 99.2% of Friendster accounts (all of which are hacked and forgotten)?
My work here is dung.
Is this what Occupy means when they say 1% of the country controls everything?
sudo make me a sandwich
How small of a group of people do you need to leave a network to reach a tipping point to cause the social network to collapse. Good to know the answer is 0.8%
I suspect I know the name of *one* of the main influencers...
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Look at, well... anything. In any human social activity, there are a few people who drive all the activity, and the rest are happy to follow along.
Even leadership personalities are followers much of the time. It's not like everyone can be leaders in everything. You can only ever lead in a few small areas. (Though of course, some people lead more than others; while some people lead in nothing at all, I suppose.)
Trying to be noticed among a million other offerings, this is good news. After doing my best job writing, I can then try to figure out how to reach my own 1% to tip them toward my work, rather than trying to brute-force popularity.
Does this remind anyone of Locke and Demosthenes from Ender's Game? Seeding a few carefully worded articles to change the discourse of the network?
Friendster? Wow, you could influence, like, 300 people
American-centrist much, you insensitive clod?
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendster
Since the relaunch of Friendster as a social gaming platform in June 2011, the number of registered users has reached over 115 million. Over 90% of Friendster's traffic came from Asia. The top 10 countries accessing Friendster, according to Alexa, as of May 7, 2009 are the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Sudan, South Korea, Bangladesh and India
A much more interesting conclusion of this study is that 99.2% of social network users will do anything their friends would tell them to do.
Let's say this model predicts that I can end terrorism by converting 100 radical muslims to buddhism. How does that help me? (Simply sending in drones to remove these nodes from the graph, so to speak, will not have the same effect).
Second example, let's say my novel is almost guaranteed to be successful if it gets a glowing review in the New York Times. Well, how hard can that be? Usually trusted nodes are trusted for some reason - because they're reliable. That means they're hard to influence.
Trying to be noticed among a million other offerings, this is good news. After doing my best job writing, I can then try to figure out how to reach my own 1% to tip them toward my work, rather than trying to brute-force popularity.
Not sure if he's the first to think of this but I read a book called The Tipping Point that describes three kinds of people: salesmen, mavens and connectors. He speculates this is a small part of the population that the rest of the population actually relies on.
Some of them you know, like Oprah and her book club. Some of them you might not realize that you have access to like a stay at home mom who talks on the phone or a literature nerd that posts all the time online.
My work here is dung.
115 million? whodathot friendster could be bigger than a lot of major religions?
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
E.g. What's happening to Obama at the moment.
Sounds like what Aaron Barr was trying to do to reveal the identities of anonymous.
I've got news for them: this works in offline social networks too. It just works faster online.
Proverbs 21:19
It looks like it peaked around 2008 (at least in interest on search engines). http://www.google.com/trends/?q=friendster
This brings to mind the Connie Willis novel Bellwether
The main character, Dr. Sandra Foster, studies fads in Boulder, Colorado. Her employer, Hi-Tek, wants to know how to predict fads, in order to take advantage of this knowledge and thus to possibly create one.
A good read, quite enjoyable and funny.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
"The trick is finding the seed set." No, it's not. The real trick is finding the seed set of the seed set. On Facebook, you have 900 million users. 1% of that is 9 million, which is too large to influence. But 1% of that 1% is just 90,000, something that a targeted advertising campaign might be able to influence.
Celebrities (which is a superset of Politician). And yes... a large portion of the population bases their decisions/vote off of what someone says simply because they look good on TV... and before that b/c they sound good on radio... and before that b/c they wrote what they wanted to hear.
Any chance they're just witnessing C&C nodes transmitting spam orders or pagerank gaming links to the remaining 99.2% of Friendster accounts (all of which are hacked and forgotten)?
It's a comp sci paper that is looking for connected nodes in a network, and they're using copies of data sets of social networks as their starting point. They aren't monitoring networks looking for "who is exerting influence over them", they're looking for nodes that are well connected to other nodes, presuming those represent the most valuable people to convince.
Now, could those "friends and families" in the network data actually be there as part of a botnet controller and its zombie minions? Sure, why not? But each one of those would be a single node in the set of nodes as having the right connections. Doesn't mean that marketing to the botherder or the botnet is going to get you much business, but if you were looking for someone who has influence, it would identify the botherder and not the bots themselves.
John
Will you change the set? The are a seed set for a reason. Will influencing them make them less credible, or whatever makes them seed-worthy?
I may have the title of this wrong, but it is a well known rule of thumb in social media tech circles that of 100% of users, 90% pretty much just read, 9% post regularly, and only 1% are really active. So they have simply come up with the algorithm to determine that 1%.
I don't see things in black and white; I see the gray. Heck, I actually see in color, which makes things more difficult
In marketing these individuals are referred to as people with high SNP (social network potential). They are people who can share one message and sway many. The goal is to get them a message either by paying them or cleverly exposing them to something that they can make go viral. I read about in a book called Digimarketing, which I think came out in 2007.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Online Social Media Networks Inflate Their Numbers by 5000%.
When only 2% of the registered accounts are active, it's not hard to see that the right 1% can make a big change.
I looked at it, and it looks like this
Only 1%? But that's an epic fail! though I kinda <3 the fact that social networks* are so much less resilient than cows! With cows, you have to tip each one individually. With people, you knock over one out of 100, and the rest drop on their belly and wriggle. A happy GOOSESTEP FUN TIEM is had by all.
But I'm a hyprocrite, because I'm a sucker for memes. I thought writing "You know what you doing!!" (the italic exclamation marks mattered more to me than anyone will ever know) was funny years after the all your base meme had died. I'll never warm up to saying "this", though. For starters, it can be too easily refuted, like by saying "not this, actually". You can outright pwn someone by replying that. But noobs never learn, do they? lulz.
(how did we call the *exactly* same thing before we had the notion of networks, by the way?)
. . .all anyone needs to know is what it will take to get Kevin Bacon to change from on social network to another.
Hmm... that theory doesn't work
How are you defining a "major religion"? Christianity has around 2 billion adherents, Islam around 1.5 billion, Hinduism around a billion, Buddhism around half a billion ... other than Judaism, what major religions can count less than 115 million people?
I guess they've never heard of George Takei... he tips The Facebook everyday.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Look you can't take claims like this seriously, by which i mean as immutable laws of nature or even as normative of online communities in a longitudinal sense, that is, as an enduring property of online communities.
From the paper:
In this problem we have a social network in the form of a directed graph and thresholds for each individual. Based on this data, the desired output is the smallest possible set of individuals such that, if initially activated, the entire population will adopt the new behavior (a seed set)
What the study shows in not that will happen in real social networks, but rather in their "tipping model" which is a directed graph whose nodes "activate" when they reach a certain threshold.of input given to them by surrounding nodes.
So what they demonstrated was a property of directed graphs and nodes with a certain made-up (ad hoc) set of characteristics. To assume that those characteristics are descriptive of human beings in a real social network is to extrapolate beyond the results of paper.
The authors obviously think that such extrapolation may be possible since they cite two other papers that they characterize as showing that real social networks have exhibited such behavior, but actually, those papers show something much more hypothetical and specific which I won't go into here.
When they say they applied their theory to social networks, (Buzznet Douban Flickr Flixster FourSquare Frienster Last.Fm LiveJournal Livemocha WikiTalk ) they mean they borrowed the physical topology - the interconnectedness of the nodes- of those networks, (which is available to researchers) NOT that they either found examples of nor instigated the real world behaviour of the people in those networks.
Back to reality, that such things CAN happen is not surprising . I am pretty sure Jennifer Aniston represented less than 1% of the group of American females in the mid 90s, and she wielded the power to tip hairstyles ("The Rachel" hairstyle!!! ) enormously in that time.
Similarly in Roman times, the hairstyles of prominent individual women would appear on coins, for instance, the Emperor's wife. This would lead to a frenzy of copycat hairstyles because hairstyle was one way the rich signaled their status.
There's a danger here that graph theory being applied to social networks will play the role of the mythical "perfectly rational actor" has played in economics. That is, a clean model which produces complex results whose ultimate referent is ONLY itself and in many decisive ways emits behaviour which is OPPOSITE of the behaviour of the real world entity which the theory sought to model.
People are irrational in ways that until recently, with the advent of behavioural economics, were not accounted for in economic models. IMO behavioural economics might as well have taken the name "real economics" . The same thing is going on here. How real people really behave in social networking sites is a wide open question. What we know is people hate to be manipulated and will act against their own seeming best interests in a wide variety of circumstances. See Dan Ariely's "Predictably Irrational" for some examples. Also here's the page on irrationality in Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrationality
The point here is
1) this is not a study of people's behaviour, it's a study of the behaviour of nodes which have just those properties the researchers elected to give them transferred to a network topologies which were taken from a variety of real social networks.
2) The behaviour of real social networks is not determined by the assumptions of the researchers
3) nor did those assumptions model the actual behavior of real people in those networks.
Real behaviour is vastly more complex than emitting behavior when a threshold "input" from surrounding people is reached.
Finally, it should be noted that p
Since it happens very easily in society, where is the surprise when aggregation of data by a piece of technology makes it easier?
Again 1% seems as high . . . also, just because something catches on easily, does that mean they can be influenced? If something is actually universally funny, wouldn't that make it catch on?
Let's study something mundane like changing from Coke to Pepsi.
.. some Jamaica, a bit of Colombian and some home grown Sensimilla ... now where is that pizza deliver number....
> other than Judaism, what major religions
Obviously Judaism isnt a "major religion" then.
like this: christianity is not a religion, it's a classification of religions. catholics are not methodists are not baptists are not 7th day adventists are not episcopalians are not jehovah witnesses etc...
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
Wrong. The inside of a Baptist church is no different than the inside of a Methodist church, and the sermons are likewise similar. The only thing that's different is the trappings; all of Christainity worship the same savior and are supposed to follow the same rules. It's no different than Ubuntu and Red Hat, both are Linux and use the same kernel.
Also, the GP's numbers are flawed (I looked it up a few weeks ao in response to a /. comment). He's overestimating the Hinus by a little, the Muslims by a little, and underestimating the number of Christians by a third. Over three billion people consider themselves Christian (even if few of them even attempt to follow Christ's teachings).
Oh, and when you don't capitalize Hindu or Muslim or Bhuddist or Christian, you're insulting millions or billions of people. We call that "flamebait" around here.
Free Martian Whores!
You forgot to mention - when he didn't capitalize Like, he insulted half a dozen Grammar Nazis.
The algorithm is described in a paper to be presented later this summer at the prestigious IEEE ASONAM conference.
I can just imagine the talk now.
We were dead wrong. The IEEE ASONAM conference is not prestigious at all. No one takes our tweets seriously. The algorithm proved conclusively that my 13 years old kid sister has more prestige and influence over the rest of academia than the entire IEEE ASONAM conference speakers and attendees combined.
i do not give a fuck what people think about my lower-case style. if you're too ignorant to realize this is my style and not flamebait, i have no sympathy for you. also, i'm not required to believe in or even respect any religion so the capitalization rule is even more irrelevant to me. oh, and you're completely wrong about there being no difference. many of them have wildly different definitions of what's required to go to heaven (and even what heaven is). some say you just need to "accept" christ, others say you have to put your money where you mouth is, others have varying ideas of what's a sin and what degree of evil it is. you should compare catholics and mormons (who, yes, proclaim to believe in jesus christ) and notice what a huge difference in ideology they have, despite having the same figurehead to worship. while ubuntu and red hat may be linux, they too behave differently -- even different flavors of ubuntu will have different package managers, desktops and workflows, drivers supported, etc. have you used unity? the fact that they use the same kernel is equivalent to the other christian religions all believing in jesus christ. after that, there are differences abound.
p.s. why don't you go post some links to pictures of the inside of a catholic cathedral, a jehovah witnesses church, and a mormon church side by side so we can see how identical they are. (hint: the mormon church is the one with the basketball court inside, with almost no exceptions).
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
Foreign agents buy US lawmakers to control US foreign policy - that's several hundred individuals out of what 250 million. Now that's influence.
That's not completely true. While they all have their roots in the same book, the actual religions can be very different.
Roman Catholics, for example, include the worship of demigods (they call them Saints) and obeisance to the Church hierarchy, as well as the rite of confession. Some Protestant religions base their religion on personal understanding of the New and Old Testaments, and the Good Book is the only set of rules to live by. Some Protestant religions include the rite of confession, some don't. Some have clergy, some don't.
To say that all Christian religions are the same except for trappings would be the same as saying that all Abrahamic faiths are the same except for trappings. I mean, sure, Christians have a set of extra books to follow (compared to Jews),and Muslims have another book on top of that. But really, it's the same God they worship, so they're all the same religion, right?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
You really are an ignorant clod aren't you. Not just for your lack of knowledge regarding religion...but your claiming improper punctuation as a style, rather than the obvious laziness that it is.
Every Baptist church I've ever been in (all of the southern verity) have a see through bath tub up behind the Sunday Morning Singers (TM) where they do the Dupe Dunking (TM). Methodist just sprinkle the Dupe Babies (TM) so they don't require the peeping-tom bath tub.
Also, Mormons are not Christian for the same reason Christians are not Jews.
See The Avatar from "The Religion War" by Scott Adams.
At first glance, this appears to be just another way to create some sort of demand for something (or someone) to just make a buck in the end. Yawn. :P
CAPTCHA: prorated [Something financial...how apt!]
Obviously both his shift keys are broken.
Did they analyze the average Bacon number of those within this tipping 1%? Since we are talking about influential people, perhaps they should have used the Christopher Lee geometric range index as well. Also, I wouldn't call it "a progressive series of 'tipping' incidents" if anything, tipping has been highly regressive for wages in the food service and hospitality industries.
And, just like both Redhat and Ubuntu apply their own patches to the standard kernel, so do the different sects within the same brand twist the rules to suit them - Jehovas can't receive blood, anglicans seem to have little problems with gays and women, et cetera.
It also depends on where you grip the various sects together to get bigger brands. You talk about Christianity as a big one; but why not grab just one branch higher and group the christians together with the jews and probably a few others under the Abrahamic religion? In the end it comes down to one or more beards in the sky. Well, except for buddhism, that has a fat man instead.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
Yeah, but what really caught me is the comment about the basketball court. Polygamy AND basketball? Where do I sign?
What a depressingly stupid machine.
No they do not.
I'm not a Roman Catholic, but I am married to one, and my best friend is one.
So sum everything up GOD = Operating System Religion = Kernel Wings = Dist Did I get it right? (Note GOD)
I just grabbed numbers from Wikipedia. I don't claim that they're precise, only that they're all a heck of a lot larger than 115 million.
I think the high-end estimates for "Christianity", though, often include groups such as Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc., whose beliefs most Christians would not consider to fall within (or even necessarily close to) the bounds of theological orthodoxy.
Christianity as a big one; but why not grab just one branch higher and group the christians together with the jews and probably a few others under the Abrahamic religion?
Because it's completely different. The Jews and Muslims are under the old covenant (they're God's chosen people) and followers of Christ are under the new covenant. Jews and Muslims must lead a perfect, sinless life to get to heaven, but Christians' sins have been paid for in blood.
Well, except for buddhism, that has a fat man instead.
I spent a year in Thailand, a Bhuddist country, and learned quite a bit about their religion. Obviously you know little about Bhuddism.
Free Martian Whores!
But if you leave out the JWs (and maybe the 7DAs), whose beliefs are rather heterodox, the rest that you mentioned (as well as the Eastern Orthodox, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and any number of other denominational or nondenominational classifications you could use to categorize Christians) absolutely share a core belief in the fundamental doctrines of the faith: e.g. essentially all Christians would agree with both the content of the three major ecumenical creeds and the centrality and importance of that content, even amidst whatever real differences they may have on other matters. C.S. Lewis popularized the term "mere Christianity" (after Baxter), and it's quite fitting here. He describes the concept in the preface of his book by that title:
The reader should be warned that I offer no help to anyone who is hesitating between two Christian "denominations." You will not learn from me whether you ought to become an Anglican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, or a Roman Catholic.
This omission is intentional (even in the list I have just given the order is alphabetical). There is no mystery about my own position. I am a very ordinary layman of the Church of England, not especially "high," nor especially "low," nor especially anything else. But in this book I am not trying to convert anyone to my own position. Ever since I became a Christian I have thought that the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbours was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times. I had more than one reason for thinking this. In the first place, the questions which divide Christians from one another often involve points of high Theology or even of ecclesiastical history which ought never to be treated except by real experts.
...
I hope no reader will suppose that "mere" Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions-as if a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else. It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable.
The authority on who is part of a religion must be the people who are themselves of that religion. If Christians consider all of these groups to comprise the Church, as distinct from other groups, we should consider the distinction they make to carry a great deal of weight.
You don't think Nazis deserve all the insults they can get?
Free Martian Whores!
Your "style" is completely unreadable. There was a book written by a drug addict with the same style that a friend wanted me to read, I got halfway through the first page and gave up.
Your aliteracy is showing, son.
Free Martian Whores!
it actually takes some extra attention to type in lowercase when i'm so used to using punctuation in all my other communications. i've actually gone back and decapitalized some sentences because i failed my own style rules. i'd have to argue that posting anonymous is laziness. can't you get an account? or if you have one, can't you get up the stones to back up your words? i do.
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my "style" requires that people pay attention to what i'm writing, rather than skimming over the words-as-pictures that are recognizable and misunderstanding my message due to laziness. speaking in all caps is considered shouting, so what i'm doing is merely speaking softly. you have to listen closely. you grok?
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Those of us who are used to reading are used to all the nuances that writing entails, including punctuation, capitalization, and often spelling if the misspelling changes the meaning of the sentence. Writing in either all caps or all lowercase makes one think the only thing you've ever read was the internet. Meaning, of course, a whole lot of ignorance.
Those of us who actually read don't have to struggle to understand what is written, so long as the so-called "writer" can actually write coherently. Not using capitals us incoherent, a pain to read, and just not worth the effort. If you want to talk to me, speak English (or Spanish if you know no English) and if you want me to read what you've written, make an effort to be readable.
h0w eAZIe iZ thI5 two REED? Sure looks retarded, doesn't it? That's what your writing looks like to me.
Free Martian Whores!
Even with algorithms like these, you're still just analysing network connections, which doesn't take into account anything like for example someone who shares content they don't agree with in order to expose it to criticism. Although it can be useful to find the nodes in a network that might be worth looking at, it seems to me humans will still be needed to interpret data and find influencers.
http://whymothersneverdrinkhottea.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/social-media-human-or-algorithmic.html
i keep getting the feeling that you think i care what you think.
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
I was born a Roman Catholic. I am married to one.
Roman Catholics pray to their Saints for divine favors. They have special days of services and rituals for specific Saints.
I don't know what to call that other than worship.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
If you ever want to have a little fun messing with a Catholic's head, ask them why Mary needed a savior. What? Yes, right there, any Catholic should recognize Mary's prayer from Lk 1:47: "my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour". How could Mary need a savior if she was sinless?
you defined them as demi gods, which they arent. athey are dead ordinary people :)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
>> Well, except for buddhism, that has a fat man instead.
> I spent a year in Thailand, a Bhuddist country, and learned quite a bit about their religion. Obviously you know little about Bhuddism.
I'm no expert on the various forms, no; but I do realise that pure, godless buddhism has in many places been mixed into the local god-based religion - so also in Thailand.
None of that was the point, however.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
Well, yes, Bhuddism is a godless religion, but the Thais still fear and respect "spirits". They build ornate little houses about the size of a bird house outside their home for the spirits to live in, so they won't go inside their own homes.
Free Martian Whores!
you defined them as demi gods, which they arent. athey are dead ordinary people :)
For ordinary dead people, Catholics sure treat them strangely like gods.
There are lots of ordinary dead people. Most of them aren't revered by Catholicism.
And I got the feeling that you might want to be educated. My bad.
Free Martian Whores!
wow. you really think you're the first person to whine like a bitch about my lowercase style? you must think you're really important. i know it annoys weirdo, OCD, anxiety-ridden control freaks like yourself, and that gives me great pleasure.
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Whatever floats your boat. If you want to continue to look ignorant, knock yourself out.
Free Martian Whores!
to the 2-3 other people reading this exchange, does it seem ironic to you that for someone who professes to hate reading my style so much, he's spent more time than anyone else doing just that? makes me wonder what his definition of ignorance is.
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
If they are ordinary dead people, why do Catholics pray to them for divine intervention?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Ask them, not me :D
Nevertheless they are former priests or other people that got declared a saint by the pope.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.