Ecology of active and passive players and their impact on information selection

Abstract

Is visitors’ attendance a fair indicator of a web site's quality? Internet sub-domains are usually characterized by power-law distributions of visits, thus suggesting a rich-get-richer process. If this is the case, the number of visits is not a relevant measure of quality. If, on the other hand, there are active players, i.e., visitors who can tell the value of the information available, better sites start getting richer after a crossover time.