Topic selectivity and adaptivity promote spreading of short messages

Why is the Twitter, with its extremely length-limited messages so popular ? Our work shows that short messages focused on a single topic may have an inherent advantage in spreading through social networks, which may explain the popularity of a service featuring only short messages. We introduce a new explanatory model for information propagation through social networks that includes selectivity of message consumption depending on their content, competition for user’s attention between messages and message content adaptivity through user-introduced changes. Our agent-based simulations indicate that the model displays inherent power-law distribution of number of shares for different messages and that the popular messages are very short. The adaptivity of messages increases the popularity of already popular messages, provided the users are neither too selective nor too accommodating. The distribution of message variants popularity also follows a power-law found in real information cascades. The observed behavior is robust against model parameter changes and differences of network topology.