The dynamics of attention in social media tend to obey power laws. Attention
concentrates on a relatively small number of popular items and neglecting the
vast majority of content produced by the crowd. Although popularity can be an
indication of the perceived value of an item within its community, previous
research has hinted to the fact that popularity is distinct from intrinsic
quality. As a result, content with low visibility but high quality lurks in the
tail of the popularity distribution. This phenomenon can be particularly
evident in the case of photo-sharing communities, where valuable photographers
who are not highly engaged in online social interactions contribute with
high-quality pictures that remain unseen. We propose to use a computer vision
method to surface beautiful pictures from the immense pool of
near-zero-popularity items, and we test it on a large dataset of
creative-commons photos on Flickr. By gathering a large crowdsourced ground
truth of aesthetics scores for Flickr images, we show that our method retrieves
photos whose median perceived beauty score is equal to the most popular ones,
and whose average is lower by only 1.5%.Comment: ICWSM 201