  Charts are used to measure relative success for a large variety of cultural
items. Traditional music charts have been shown to follow self-organizing
principles with regard to the distribution of item lifetimes, the on-chart
residence times. Here we examine if this observation holds also for (a) music
streaming charts (b) book best-seller lists and (c) for social network activity
charts, such as Twitter hashtags and the number of comments Reddit postings
receive. We find that charts based on the active production of items, like
commenting, are more likely to be influenced by external factors, in particular
by the 24 hour day-night cycle. External factors are less important for
consumption-based charts (sales, downloads), which can be explained by a
generic theory of decision-making. In this view, humans aim to optimize the
information content of the internal representation of the outside world, which
is logarithmically compressed. Further support for information maximization is
argued to arise from the comparison of hourly, daily and weekly charts, which
allow to gauge the importance of decision times with respect to the chart
compilation period.
