Characterizing behavioral trends in a community driven discussion platform

TL;DR

This paper systematically analyzes user behavior patterns on Reddit, revealing insights into inactive posts, short-lived viral content, limelight hogging, and controversies, and compares social media evolution over years.

Contribution

It introduces methods to analyze activity around posts, identify limelight hogging, and study controversy presence, providing new insights into community-driven platform dynamics.

Findings

Many inactive posts fail to attract attention despite user effort

Short-lived posts can become extremely active briefly, like Mayfly Buzz

Presence of limelight hogging activity and controversies in posts

Abstract

This article presents a systematic analysis of the patterns of behavior of individuals as well as groups observed in community-driven platforms for discussion like Reddit, where users usually exchange information and viewpoints on their topics of interest. We perform a statistical analysis of the behavior of posts and model the users' interactions around them. A platform like Reddit which has grown exponentially, starting from a very small community to one of the largest social networks, with its large user base and popularity harboring a variety of behavior of users in terms of their activity. Our work provides interesting insights about a huge number of inactive posts which fail to attract attention despite their authors exhibiting Cyborg-like behavior to attract attention. We also observe short-lived yet extremely active posts emulate a phenomenon like Mayfly Buzz. A method is presented, to study the activity around posts which are highly active, to determine the presence of Limelight hogging activity. We also present a systematic analysis to study the presence of controversies in posts. We analyzed data from two periods of one-year duration but separated by few years in time, to understand how social media has evolved through the years.