Kudos make you run!

How runners influence each other on the online social network Strava

Abstract

We used Strava’s big data to investigate influence dynamics among athletes in online social networks. We constructed a longitudinal dataset of complete networks and behavior over 11 periods with a one-month time window for five different Strava clubs with a total of 329 members. We tested our hypotheses using RSiena. We found that receiving kudos makes you run more and more often and that athletes tended to adjust their running behavior to that of their kudos-friends. But the story is way more nuanced, so check out the complete paper! Together with the paper we constructed a detailed replication repository/website. Long live Open Science!

Publication
Social Networks