Kiran Garimella and Robert West: Evolution of Retweet Rates in Twitter User Careers: Analysis and Model. Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Web and Social Media, 2021.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.10754
The dataset, as well as code for obtaining historical follower counts from the Internet Archive, can be found at https://zenodo.org/record/4685973
We study the evolution of the number of retweets received by Twitter users over the course of their “careers” on the platform. We find that on average the number of retweets received by users tends to increase over time. This is partly expected because users tend to gradually accumulate followers. Normalizing by the number of followers, however, reveals that the relative, per-follower retweet rate tends to be non-monotonic, maximized at a “peak age” after which it does not increase, or even decreases. We develop a simple mathematical model of the process behind this phenomenon, which assumes a constantly growing number of followers, each of whom loses interest over time. We show that this model is sufficient to explain the non-monotonic nature of per-follower retweet rates, without any assumptions about the quality of content posted at different times
For questions and comments please contact Kiran Garimella (garimell@mit.edu) or Robert West (robert.west@epfl.ch).