Analyzing behavioral trends in community driven discussion platforms like Reddit

TL;DR

This paper presents methods to analyze behavioral patterns on Reddit, revealing inactive posts, short-lived viral content, and activity dynamics around popular posts through extensive data analysis over two years.

Contribution

It introduces novel analytical methods for understanding user behavior and post dynamics on Reddit, highlighting patterns like Cyborg-like activity and Mayfly Buzz phenomena.

Findings

Inactive posts often fail to attract attention despite user effort.

Short-lived posts can become extremely active briefly.

Activity around popular posts shows signs of limelight hogging.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present methods to systematically analyze individual and group behavioral patterns observed in community driven discussion platforms like Reddit where users exchange information and views on various topics of current interest. We conduct this study by analyzing the statistical behavior of posts and modeling user interactions around them. We have chosen Reddit as an example, since it has grown exponentially from a small community to one of the biggest social network platforms in the recent times. Due to its large user base and popularity, a variety of behavior is present among users in terms of their activity. Our study provides interesting insights about a large number of inactive posts which fail to gather attention despite their authors exhibiting Cyborg-like behavior to draw attention. We also present interesting insights about short-lived but extremely active posts emulating a phenomenon like Mayfly Buzz. Further, we present methods to find the nature of activity around highly active posts to determine the presence of Limelight hogging activity, if any. We analyzed over $2$ million posts and more than $7$ million user responses to them during entire 2008 and over $63$ million posts and over $608$ million user responses to them from August 2014 to July 2015 amounting to two one-year periods, in order to understand how social media space has evolved over the years.