  Cascades on online networks have been a popular subject of study in the past
decade, and there is a considerable literature on phenomena such as diffusion
mechanisms, virality, cascade prediction, and peer network effects. However, a
basic question has received comparatively little attention: how desirable are
cascades on a social media platform from the point of view of users? While
versions of this question have been considered from the perspective of the
producers of cascades, any answer to this question must also take into account
the effect of cascades on their audience. In this work, we seek to fill this
gap by providing a consumer perspective of cascade.
  Users on online networks play the dual role of producers and consumers.
First, we perform an empirical study of the interaction of Twitter users with
retweet cascades. We measure how often users observe retweets in their home
timeline, and observe a phenomenon that we term the "Impressions Paradox": the
share of impressions for cascades of size k decays much slower than frequency
of cascades of size k. Thus, the audience for cascades can be quite large even
for rare large cascades. We also measure audience engagement with retweet
cascades in comparison to non-retweeted content. Our results show that cascades
often rival or exceed organic content in engagement received per impression.
This result is perhaps surprising in that consumers didn't opt in to see tweets
from these authors. Furthermore, although cascading content is widely popular,
one would expect it to eventually reach parts of the audience that may not be
interested in the content. Motivated by our findings, we posit a theoretical
model that focuses on the effect of cascades on the audience. Our results on
this model highlight the balance between retweeting as a high-quality content
selection mechanism and the role of network users in filtering irrelevant
content.
