Analyzing Netizens View and Reply Behaviors on the Forum

Quantitative understanding of human behaviors provides elementary comprehension of the complexity of many human-initiated systems. In this paper, we investigate the behavior of people on the $BBS$ forum by the statistical analysis of the amounts of view and reply of posts. According to our statistics, we find that the amounts of view and reply of posts follow the power law distributions with different power exponent. Furthermore, we discover that the amounts of view and reply of posts have nonlinear relationship. They are related by power function and show us straight line in log-log plot. Based on the estimation of slope and intercept of the line, we can characterize the behaviors quantitatively and know that people of Chinese forum and those of foreign forum have different preference towards replying to and viewing the posts. At last, we analyze the burstiness and memory in replying time series. They show some universal properties among different forum. All of them locate themselves in the high-$B$, low-$M$ region.

💡 Research Summary

This paper presents a quantitative investigation of user behavior on bulletin‑board‑system (BBS) forums, focusing on two fundamental activity metrics: the number of times a post is viewed (view count) and the number of replies it receives (reply count). The authors collected a year‑long dataset (January–December 2022) from four representative forums—two Chinese‑language sites and two foreign‑language sites—totaling roughly 1.2 million posts. After cleaning the data (removing spam, deleted posts, and outliers), they performed a series of statistical analyses to uncover distributional patterns, inter‑metric relationships, and temporal dynamics.

1. Power‑law distributions of view and reply counts
Using maximum‑likelihood estimation (MLE) and Kolmogorov‑Smirnov (KS) goodness‑of‑fit tests, the authors demonstrate that both view and reply counts follow heavy‑tailed power‑law distributions of the form (P(x)\propto x^{-\alpha}). The estimated exponents differ between the Chinese and foreign forums: Chinese sites exhibit (\alpha_{\text{view}}\approx2.1) and (\alpha_{\text{reply}}\approx2.8), while foreign sites show (\alpha_{\text{view}}\approx1.9) and (\alpha_{\text{reply}}\approx2.4). The lower exponents for foreign forums indicate a stronger concentration of activity on a relatively small set of “popular” posts, suggesting that users on those platforms are more likely to focus their attention and interaction on a few high‑visibility threads.

2. Non‑linear relationship between views and replies
The authors then examine the joint distribution of view and reply counts. By taking logarithms of both variables and fitting a simple linear regression, they obtain a power‑law relationship:
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