Edited by Alessandro Vespignani, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, and accepted by the Editorial Board September 10, 2014 (received for review May 31, 2013)
The emergence of the Internet as the primary medium for information exchange has led to the development of many decentralized sharing systems. The most popular among them, BitTorrent, is used by tens of millions of people monthly and is responsible for more than one-third of the total Internet traffic. Despite its growing social, economic, and technological importance, there is little understanding of how users behave in this ecosystem. Because of the decentralized structure of peer-to-peer services, it is very difficult to gather data on users behaviors, and it is in this sense that peer-to-peer file-sharing has been called the “dark matter” of the Internet. Here, we investigate users activity patterns and uncover socioeconomic factors that could explain their behavior.
Tens of millions of individuals around the world use decentralized content distribution systems, a fact of growing social, economic, and technological importance. These sharing systems are poorly understood because, unlike in other technosocial systems, it is difficult to gather large-scale data about user behavior. Here, we investigate user activity patterns and the socioeconomic factors that could explain the behavior. Our analysis reveals that (i) the ecosystem is heterogeneous at several levels: content types are heterogeneous, users specialize in a few content types, and countries are heterogeneous in user profiles; and (ii) there is a strong correlation between socioeconomic indicators of a country and users behavior. Our findings open a research area on the dynamics of decentralized sharing ecosystems and the socioeconomic factors affecting them, and may have implications for the design of algorithms and for policymaking.
Author contributions: A.G.-M., F.E.B., L.A.N.A., J.D., and R.G. designed research; A.G.-M., L.A.N.A., J.D., and R.G. performed research; A.G.-M., D.R.C., J.S.O., M.A.S., F.E.B., L.A.N.A., J.D., and R.G. analyzed data; and A.G.-M., D.R.C., F.E.B., L.A.N.A., J.D., and R.G. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. A.V. is a guest editor invited by the Editorial Board.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1309389111/-/DCSupplemental.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
