Sharing topics in pinterest: Understanding content creation and diffusion behaviors

Pinterest provides a social curation service where people can collect, organize, and share content (pins in Pinterest) that reflect their interests. This paper investigates (1) the differences in pinning (i.e., the act of posting a pin) and repinning (i.e., the act of sharing other user's pin) behaviors by topics and user gender, and (2) the relations among topics in Pinterest. We conduct a measurement study using a large-scale dataset (1.6 M pins shared by 1.1 M users) in Pinterest. We show that there is a notable discrepancy between pinning and repinning behaviors on different topics. We also show that male and female users show different behaviors on different topics in terms of dedication, responsiveness, and sentiment. By introducing the notion of a Topic Network (TN) whose nodes are topics and are linked if they share common users, we analyze how topics are related to one another, which can give a valuable implication on topic demand forecasting or cross-topic advertisement. Lastly, we explore the implications of our findings for predicting a user's interests and behavioral patterns in Pinterest.