Abstract
Heavy-tailed distributions of meme popularity occur naturally in a model of
meme diffusion on social networks. Competition between multiple memes for the
limited resource of user attention is identified as the mechanism that poises
the system at criticality. The popularity growth of each meme is described by a
critical branching process, and asymptotic analysis predicts power-law
distributions of popularity with very heavy tails (exponent \$\alpha<2\$, unlike
preferential-attachment models), similar to those seen in empirical data.
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