Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
5-2011
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.
Keywords
unfollow, computer-mediated communication, Twitter, online relationship
Discipline
Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
Research Areas
Data Science and Engineering
Publication
Proceedings of the 29th Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2011 Vancouver, BC, Canada, May 7-12
First Page
1091
Last Page
1100
ISBN
9781450302678
Identifier
10.1145/1978942.1979104
Publisher
ACM
City or Country
New York
Citation
1
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.