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Fragile online relationship: a first look at unfollow dynamics in twitter

Published: 07 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

We analyze the dynamics of the behavior known as 'unfollow' in Twitter. We collected daily snapshots of the online relationships of 1.2 million Korean-speaking users for 51 days as well as all of their tweets. We found that Twitter users frequently unfollow. We then discover the major factors, including the reciprocity of the relationships, the duration of a relationship, the followees' informativeness, and the overlap of the relationships, which affect the decision to unfollow. We conduct interview with 22 Korean respondents to supplement the quantitative results.
They unfollowed those who left many tweets within a short time, created tweets about uninteresting topics, or tweeted about the mundane details of their lives. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first systematic study of the unfollow behavior in Twitter.

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          cover image ACM Conferences
          CHI '11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
          May 2011
          3530 pages
          ISBN:9781450302289
          DOI:10.1145/1978942
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          Published: 07 May 2011

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          1. computer-mediated communication
          2. online relationship
          3. twitter
          4. unfollow

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