Statistical analysis of emotions and opinions at Digg website

TL;DR

This study analyzes emotional responses and user engagement on Digg.com, revealing correlations between diggs, comments, and emotional tone, and how initial comments influence discussion length and dynamics.

Contribution

It provides a novel statistical analysis linking emotional content, user interactions, and discussion dynamics on Digg, highlighting mechanisms influencing thread length and evolution.

Findings

High correlation between diggs and comments in short threads

Longer threads show increased correlation between emotional response and diggs

Initial negative emotions lead to longer discussions

Abstract

We performed statistical analysis on data from the Digg.com website, which enables its users to express their opinion on news stories by taking part in forum-like discussions as well as directly evaluate previous posts and stories by assigning so called "diggs". Owing to fact that the content of each post has been annotated with its emotional value, apart from the strictly structural properties, the study also includes an analysis of the average emotional response of the posts commenting the main story. While analysing correlations at the story level, an interesting relationship between the number of diggs and the number of comments received by a story was found. The correlation between the two quantities is high for data where small threads dominate and consistently decreases for longer threads. However, while the correlation of the number of diggs and the average emotional response tends to grow for longer threads, correlations between numbers of comments and the average emotional response are almost zero. We also show that the initial set of comments given to a story has a substantial impact on the further "life" of the discussion: high negative average emotions in the first 10 comments lead to longer threads while the opposite situation results in shorter discussions. We also suggest presence of two different mechanisms governing the evolution of the discussion and, consequently, its length.