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 corpus reflects the heterogeneity of the underlying social background. In the Italian Facebook we have found an interesting case: a page having more than \(40K\) followers that every day posts the same picture of a popular Italian singer. In this work, we use such a page as a control to study and model the relationship between content heterogeneity on popularity. In particular, we use that page for a comparative analysis of information consumption patterns with respect to pages posting science and conspiracy news. In total, we analyze about \(2M\) likes and \(190K\) comments, made by approximately \(340K\) and \(65K\) users, respectively. We conclude the paper by introducing a model mimicking users selection preferences accounting for the heterogeneity of contents.