Being rational or aggressive? A revisit to Dunbar's number in online social networks

NEUROCOMPUTING

卷:142

Article

Zhao, Jichang¹  Wu, Junjie²  Liu, Guannan³  Tao, Dacheng⁴  Xu, Ke¹  Liu, Chunyang⁵ 

[1] Beihang Univ, State Key Lab Software Dev Environm, Beijing 100191, Peoples R China

[2] Beihang Univ, Sch Econ & Management, Beijing 100191, Peoples R China

[3] Tsinghua Univ, Sch Econ & Management, Beijing, Peoples R China

[4] Univ Technol Sydney, Ctr Quantum Computat & Intelligent Syst, Sydney, NSW 2007, Australia

[5] Coordinat Ctr China, Natl Comp Network Emergency Response Tech Team, Shanghai, Peoples R China

关键词: Online social network;    Dunbar's number;    User behavior;    Network evolution modeling;    Viral marketing;    Privacy;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.neucom.2014.04.025

来源: Elsevier

【 摘 要 】

Recent years have witnessed the explosive growth of online social networks (OSNs). They provide powerful IT-innovations for online social activities such as organizing contacts, publishing content, and sharing interests between friends who may never meet before. As more and more people become active users of OSNs, one may ponder questions such as (1) Do OSNs indeed improve our sociability? (2) To what extent can we expand our offline social spectrum in OSNs? (3) Can we identify some interesting user behaviors in OSNs? Our work in this paper attempts to answer these interesting questions. First, we systematically validate the existence of a new Dunbar's number in OSNs, which is ranging from 200 to 300 empirically. To reach this, we conduct local-structure analysis as well as user-interaction analysis on extensive real-world OSNs. Second, based on this new number, we divide OSN users into two categories:. the rational and the aggressive, and find that rational users intend to develop close and reciprocated relationship, whereas aggressive users have no consistent behaviors. Third, we propose a simple model to highlight the constraints of time and cognition that may affect the evolution of OSNs heavily. Finally, we discuss the potential use of our findings for viral marketing and privacy management in OSNs. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

【 授权许可】

Free