Manuel will be presenting on the annual EMAC conference, taking place 25 – 28 May.

Mechanisms and early signals behind predictive users in online communities” by
Manuel S. Mariani (University of Zurich), René Algesheimer (University of Zurich):

Recent works have found that in social systems, a minority of “discoverers” predict future popularity trends via their early adoptions. Using data from large-scale online communities, we validate potential social and preference mechanisms behind their emergence. We find that the discoverers are not highly influential, but highly representative of other users’ preferences, which enables their detection from their earliest actions in the community.