Everyday the same picture: Popularity and content diversity

Abstract

Facebook is flooded by diverse and heterogeneous content, from kittens up to music and news, passing through satirical and funny stories. Each piece of that vivid production reflects the heterogeneity of the underlying social background and provides sometimes interesting opportunities for the study of social dynamics. Indeed, in Facebook we found an interesting case: a page having more than 40 K followers that every day posts the same picture of a popular Italian singer. We use such a peculiar page as a baseline for the study and modeling of the relationship between content heterogeneity and popularity. In particular, we perform a comparative analysis of information consumption patterns with respect to pages posting heterogeneous content (science and conspiracy news). We conclude the paper by introducing a model mimicking users selection preferences accounting for the heterogeneity of contents.