Analyzing Network Effects on a Fanfiction Community

Abstract

Since the early days of the Web 2.0, online communities have been growing quickly and have become important part of life for large number of people. In one of these communities, fanfiction.net, users can read and write stories which are adapted, recreated and modified from original famous books, tv series, movies, among others. By following stories and their authors, the fanfiction community creates a social network. Previous research on online communities has shown how features of the social network can help explain the behavior of the community, so we are interested in studying fanfiction's social network as well as its influence in aspects of the community. In particular, in this article we describe several properties of the members of the community, and we also try to discover which factors explain the popularity of the authors. We discover that time since joining fanfiction and the size of the authors' biography, has a negative effect on the authors popularity. Moreover, we show that the users' network metrics help to explain better authors' popularity.