CS Department, ITU Copenhagen, Rued Langgaards Vej 7, Copenhagen, Denmark.
PS Department, Copenhagen University, Øster Farimagsgade 5, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Sci Rep. 2022 Sep 10;12(1):15265. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-19433-9.
Information has major consequences for democracy and society. It is important to understand what factors favor its diffusion. The impact of the content of a message on its likelihood of going viral is poorly understood. Some studies say originality is important for a message not to be overlooked. Others give more relevance to paratextual elements-network centrality, timing, human cognitive limits. Here we propose that originality and centrality interact in a nontrivial way, which might explain why originality by itself is not a good predictor of success. We collected data from Reddit on users sharing hyperlinks. We estimated the originality of each post title and the centrality of the website hosting the shared link. We show that the interaction effect exists: if users share content from a central website, originality no longer increases the odds of receiving at least one upvote. The same is not true for the odds of becoming one of the top 10% scoring posts. We show that originality is concentrated in the domain network: domains in the core of the network produce more original content. Our results imply that research on online information virality needs to take into account the nontrivial interaction between originality and prominence.
信息对民主和社会具有重大影响。了解哪些因素有利于信息的传播非常重要。信息内容对其传播概率的影响还不太清楚。一些研究表明，信息的新颖性对于不被忽视很重要。另一些研究则更关注超文本元素——网络中心性、时间、人类认知极限。在这里，我们提出新颖性和中心性以一种非平凡的方式相互作用，这可能解释了为什么新颖性本身并不是成功的良好预测指标。我们从 Reddit 上收集了用户分享超链接的数据。我们估计了每个帖子标题的新颖性和共享链接所在网站的中心性。我们表明，这种交互效应确实存在：如果用户从中心网站分享内容，新颖性不再增加获得至少一个点赞的几率。但是，对于成为评分最高的前 10%帖子的几率，情况并非如此。我们表明，新颖性集中在域网络中：网络核心中的域产生更多原创内容。我们的结果表明，在线信息传播研究需要考虑新颖性和突出性之间的非平凡相互作用。
