  Online user dynamics has been actively studied in recent years and bandwagon
behavior is one of the most representative topics which can provide valuable
insights for user identity change. Many previous studies have characterized
bandwagon users and leveraged such characteristics to tackle practical problems
such as community loyalty prediction. However, very few of them have
investigated bandwagon dynamics from a long-term perspective. In this work, we
focus on characterizing and predicting long-term bandwagon user behaviors in
the context of online fan loyalty. Using a dataset collected from NBA-related
discussion forums on Reddit, we trace the long-term loyalty status of bandwagon
fans to capture their latent behavioral characteristics and then propose a
computational model to predict their next sport season loyalty status with
their home teams. Our analyses reveal that bandwagoning for most fans is a
temporary switch and most of them will be back in the long term. In addition,
online fans with different loyalty levels to their home teams have demonstrated
different behaviors in various aspects, such as activity level, language usage
and reply network properties. We then propose a model based on such behavioral
characteristics to predict their next-season loyalty status. Its promising
performance demonstrates the effectiveness of our behavior characterization.
