An empirical investigation and theoretic modeling for the collective online visiting behaviors

We study Tianya club (one of influential Chinese Bulletin Board System, or BBS), Tianya Zatan board users' clicks and replies behavior. We investigate the underlying statistics of clicks and replies, unravel the mechanism of the collective novelty decay and provide a probabilistic model to describe the users' cumulative clicking patterns. We find that the amount of clicks of the posts satisfy Geometric Brownian Motion and log-normal distribution, both the collective novelty and inter-replying time have an exponential decaying characteristic, and the amount of replies and clicks follow the power law distribution. Finally, sensation-stimulus law of psychophysics is used to explain the correlation between clicks and replies. This paper provides valuable insights for the collective online visiting behaviors, as well as an empirical and theoretic understanding for the massive online attention decaying principle.