# Identifying the social signals that drive online discussions: A case study of Reddit communities

## TL;DR

This study analyzes Reddit comments to identify social signals that predict which content attracts the most attention, revealing community-specific factors influencing online discussion engagement.

## Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive feature set, including novel Reddit-specific features, and demonstrates accurate prediction of top comments across diverse communities.

## Key findings

- Models accurately predict high-attention comments
- Community differences influence content engagement
- High-scoring posts vary by topic, style, and moderation

## Abstract

Increasingly people form opinions based on information they consume on online social media. As a result, it is crucial to understand what type of content attracts people's attention on social media and drive discussions. In this paper we focus on online discussions. Can we predict which comments and what content gets the highest attention in an online discussion? How does this content differ from community to community? To accomplish this, we undertake a unique study of Reddit involving a large sample comments from 11 popular subreddits with different properties. We introduce a large number of sentiment, relevance, content analysis features including some novel features customized to reddit. Through a comparative analysis of the chosen subreddits, we show that our models are correctly able to retrieve top replies under a post with great precision. In addition, we explain our findings with a detailed analysis of what distinguishes high scoring posts in different communities that differ along the dimensions of the specificity of topic and style, audience and level of moderation.