[Paper Review] Competition Dynamics in the Meme Ecosystem

Trenton W. Ford, Rachel Krohn+1 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Feb 8, 2021

Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence4 citations

TL;DR

This paper applies an ecological framework to analyze competition dynamics in the Reddit meme ecosystem, tracking 352 popular text memes over a decade. It finds that while memes constitute a stable fraction of Reddit's content, their average lifespan has sharply declined due to increasing competition and shrinking collective attention spans, indicating a growing scarcity of user attention despite platform growth.

ABSTRACT

The creation and sharing of memes is a common modality of online social interactions. The goal of the present work is to better understand the collective dynamics of memes in this accelerating and competitive environment. By taking an ecological perspective and tracking the meme-text from 352 popular memes over the entirety of Reddit, we are able to show that the frequency of memes has scaled almost exactly with the total amount of content created over the past decade. This means that as more data is posted, an equal proportion of memes are posted. One consequence of limited human attention in the face of a growing number of memes is that the diversity of these memes has decreased at the community level, albeit slightly, in the same period. Another consequence is that the average lifespan of a meme has decreased dramatically, which is further evidence of an increase in competition and a decreasing collective attention span.

Motivation & Objective

• To understand how collective user attention scales in relation to increasing content production on social media platforms.
• To investigate how memes compete for limited human attention and how new memes impact existing meme ecosystems.
• To examine temporal changes in meme dynamics, including lifespan, diversity, and popularity turnover.
• To evaluate whether the ecological perspective offers a more insightful framework than economics or epidemiology for modeling meme diffusion.

Proposed method

• Tracked the textual variants of 352 popular memes across all of Reddit from 2009 to 2019 using a strict text-matching algorithm.
• Measured meme frequency relative to total Reddit content volume to assess proportional engagement over time.
• Quantified meme diversity per subreddit using Shannon entropy and observed trends across time and communities.
• Analyzed meme lifespan by computing the duration of active mentions after peak popularity, using survival analysis techniques.
• Correlated changes in attention span with platform growth, using Pearson correlation to assess trends in lifespan and activity decay.
• Used the KnowYourMeme dataset as the primary source for popularity and timeline data, applying cumulative popularity metrics to infer lifecycle patterns.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 How does the collective user attention scale? Do more users permit a larger or smaller number of memes?
• RQ2 How do memes compete for attention? How does the introduction of a new meme impact the ecosystem of existing memes?
• RQ3 How have the dynamics of collective attention changed over time?

Key findings

• The relative fraction of Reddit content devoted to memes has remained nearly constant over the past decade, indicating that memes scale proportionally with overall platform growth.
• Meme diversity across subreddits has decreased slightly over time, despite the growth in the number of communities, suggesting narrowing shared cultural references.
• The average lifespan of memes has decreased significantly, with a Pearson correlation of r = -0.59 (p < 0.01), indicating accelerated rise and fall cycles.
• Despite increasing platform volume, the absolute number of active memes has grown, but at a rate outpaced by the overall growth of Reddit, reinforcing attention scarcity.
• Longstanding memes like 'cool story bro' persist beyond the data window, but even these must compete for attention, indicating no meme is truly immortal in the ecosystem.
• The patterns of relative meme growth and decay remain stable over time, suggesting that while absolute speeds increase, the underlying dynamics of meme diffusion are bounded by attention constraints.