The objective of this paper is to understand an aspect of human social interaction in public bulletin board systems (BBSs). We try to answer the question of why and how a long and hot chain of articles often emerges in BBSs. This paper presents the following three contributions.
(1) Empirical results: we measured and analyzed actual BBS logs, and found that the number of articles submitted by each individual in an article chain follows a lognormal distribution.
(2) Model: to investigate why the distribution emerges through individual activities, we developed a simple model of voluntary submission activity for each individual. With only this simple mechanism, the lognormal distribution shown in actual data is reproduced.
(3) Analytical solution: we showed that the model generates a lognormal distribution when the number of members in a BBS community is constant, and the individuals in a community are homogeneous.
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