Talking to the crowd: What do people react to in online discussions?

TL;DR

This paper investigates how language features influence community reactions in online forums, using a new comment ranking task based on Reddit karma, revealing that language importance varies across communities.

Contribution

Introduces a novel comment ranking task controlling for topic and timing, and analyzes how language features impact community reactions across different Reddit communities.

Findings

Language feature importance varies by community

Reddit karma correlates with specific language cues

Community-specific language effects influence comment ranking

Abstract

This paper addresses the question of how language use affects community reaction to comments in online discussion forums, and the relative importance of the message vs. the messenger. A new comment ranking task is proposed based on community annotated karma in Reddit discussions, which controls for topic and timing of comments. Experimental work with discussion threads from six subreddits shows that the importance of different types of language features varies with the community of interest.