Understanding user dynamics in online communities has become an active research topic and can provide valuable insights for human behavior analysis and community management. In this work, we investigate the "bandwagon fan" phenomenon, a special case of user dynamics, to provide a large-scale characterization of online fan loyalty in the context of professional sports teams. We leverage the existing structure of NBA-related discussion forums on Reddit, investigate the general bandwagon patterns, and trace the behavior of bandwagon fans to capture latent behavioral characteristics. We observe that better teams attract more bandwagon fans, but they do not necessarily come from weak teams. Our analysis of bandwagon fan flow also shows different trends for different teams, as the playoff season progresses. Furthermore, we compare bandwagon users with non-bandwagon users in terms of their activity and language usage. We find that bandwagon users write shorter comments but receive better feedback, and use words that show less attachment to their affiliated teams. Our observations allow for more effective identification of bandwagon users and prediction of users' future bandwagon behavior in a season, as demonstrated by the significant improvement over the baseline method in our evaluation results.
翻译:在这项工作中,我们调查了“bandwagon fan”现象,这是一个用户动态的特例,以提供专业体育队对网上粉丝忠诚的大规模特征描述。我们利用了与NBA有关的Reddit论坛的现有结构,调查了总宽幅图案,并追踪了带宽粉丝捕捉潜在行为特征的行为模式。我们观察到,更好的团队吸引了更多的bandwagon粉丝,但不一定来自弱小团队。我们对带宽扇流的分析也显示了不同团队的不同趋势,因为玩耍季节正在取得进展。此外,我们从活动和使用语言的角度将带宽用户与非带宽用户进行比较。我们发现,带宽用户撰写了较短的评论,但得到更好的反馈,并使用与其附属团队不太相依的词语。我们的观察使得能够更有效地识别带宽幅用户,并预测用户在一个季节的未来的宽幅幅行为,正如我们评估结果基准方法的重大改进所显示的那样。