An Analysis of Reddit
Reddit is a popular news-sharing, social media website used by many online. The vast majority of the content is driven by its users. An individual user submits an article, or a text, and is either ‘up-voted’ or ‘down-voted’ to rank the quality of the submission by other users. Furthermore, the users of the Reddit community frequently engage in discussions for each posts, with the comments once again allowed to be ‘up-voted’ or ‘down-voted’. This article focused on the analysis of the relationships between individual subReddits of Reddit, and the comment discussions of Reddit.
The analysis of the subReddits revealed some interesting points. First, the older subReddits tend to be overwhelmingly more popular than others. Secondly, even though there were over 24,000 individual subReddits, massive gaps exist between the average subscriber count per subReddit (1077 users), to the largest subReddit (1,140,436 users). This indicates that many new users are most likely to subscribe to a popular, pre-existing subReddit, rather than join a less popular subReddit, which makes it difficult for the newer subReddits to gain more users.
If two subReddits have a common interest (i.e – r/comics and r/webcomics), they reference each other on their own page (i.e two nodes being connected by an edge). This led me to think that Reddit’s overall graph structure would be well connected amongst each other. However, graph analysis showed that the largest subReddit (and its related component) was solely connected to 25% of the other subReddits – making it a very loosely connected graph structure compared to other social media platforms. I found it noteworthy that, although Reddit’s overall graph structure was unlike other social media platforms, it still only contained 1 giant component (as mentioned Easley & Kleinberg), and that the 1 giant component shared similar properties to large-scale networks regarding paths and connectivity.
The comment analysis section of the paper showed that 99% of the users/comments were at least connected amongst each other in a loose manner (i.e – user A commenting on a post of user B). It was noted that users who have commented on a post, will be more highly active in the following discussions. The most interesting point was that the comments discussion of each Reddit post showed similarities to Reddit’s overall structure mentioned above – The more ‘up-voted’ comments are more likely to receive an ‘up-vote’, regardless of whether the quality of the comment is high or low.
As an avid reader of Reddit, this paper confirmed the overall thoughts I had about Reddit as a whole. Its unique structure amongst social media platforms give it properties only available to itself, while supporting common themes in social networks, such as the triadic closure. However, Reddit’s structure also creates a problem where all aspects of the site (subReddits, posts, comments), focus more on the popularity rather than the quantity. Overall, what Reddit shows us is that social networks are very dynamic and diverse and thus we need to not only consider common properties found in larger, higher level networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), but also appreciate and study the variances found at lower levels as well.
http://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-2011/proj/tbower_Finalwriteup_v1.pdf