
Information flow reveals prediction limits in online social activity - godelmachine
https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/03/26/information-flow-reveals-prediction-limits-in-online-social-activity/
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andrenotgiant
I wish authors of papers like this would publish an online tool to demonstrate
their findings. I think a demonstration of this particular paper would be much
less impressive then their misleading charts[1] try and make it out to be.

For example, they excluded retweets but what about replies? When your friend
asks you about [TOPIC] in a tweet, of course your reply is going to be related
to [TOPIC].

What about Twitter users who mostly use it to comment on breaking news? Of
course 90% of the words are going to be predictable, but it's the 10% that are
different and important.

[1] - None of their charts have y-axis starting at 0, leading to a much more
extreme-looking difference in results.
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.04575.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.04575.pdf)

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YeGoblynQueenne
That paper was published on Arxiv in August 2017. Has it been published
anywhere else since? In other words- has it passed muster (a.k.a. peer
review)?

