As the rate of content production grows, we must make a staggering number of
daily decisions about what information is worth acting on. For any flourishing
online social media system, users can barely keep up with the new content
shared by friends. How does the user-interface design help or hinder users'
ability to find interesting content? We analyze the choices people make about
which information to propagate on the social media sites Twitter and Digg. We
observe regularities in behavior which can be attributed directly to cognitive
limitations of humans, resulting from the different visibility policies of each
site. We quantify how people divide their limited attention among competing
sources of information, and we show how the user-interface design can mediate
information spread.Comment: Appearing in 2nd International Workshop on Social Multimedia Research
2013, in conjunction with IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo
(ICME 2013
