Fates of Microscopic Social Ecosystems: Keep Alive or Dead?

A social network is an ecosystem, and one of its ultimate goals is to maintain itself sustainable, namely keeping users generating information and being informed. However, the reasons why some social ecosystems can keep self-sustaining and others end up with non-active or dead states are largely unknown. In this paper, rather than studying social ecosystems at the population level, we analyze the fates of different microscopic social ecosystems, namely the final states of their collective activity dynamics in a real-world online social media with detailed individual level records for the first time. We find huge complexities in microscopic social ecosystems, including complex species types, complex individual interaction networks, and complex dynamics and final states. In order to capture the observed complexities in the real-world data, we propose a microscopic ecological model, which is able to capture the complex fates of heterogeneous microscopic social ecosystems accurately in both synthetic and empirical datasets. Furthermore, we analyze the driven factors of the fates of microscopic social ecosystems, including interaction networks of individuals and dynamical interaction mechanisms of species, leading to the control of microscopic social ecosystems, that is the ability to influence the temporal behaviours and their final states towards active or dead fates.