Judging a book by its cover: Predicting the marginal impact of title on Reddit post popularity

TL;DR

This paper presents an interpretable attention-based model that predicts Reddit post popularity based on titles, revealing how specific words influence virality across diverse communities and emphasizing the importance of sentiment, storytelling, and personality politics.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel attention-based model that accurately predicts post popularity and interprets how title words impact virality across various online communities.

Findings

Model achieves state-of-the-art prediction accuracy.

Word importance varies across communities.

Sentiment, storytelling, and personality influence virality.

Abstract

Several factors influence the popularity of content on social media, including the what, when, and who of a post. Of these factors, the what and when of content are easiest to customize in order to maximize viewership and reach. Further, the title of a post (part of the what) is the easiest to tailor, compared to the post's body, which is often fixed. So, in this paper, we assess the impact of a post's title on its popularity while controlling for the time of posting (the when) by proposing an interpretable attention-based model. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in predicting the popularity of posts on multiple online communities of various sizes, topics, and formats while still being parsimonious. Interpretation of our model's attention weights sheds light on the heterogeneous patterns in how the specific words in a post's title shape its popularity across different communities. Our results highlight the power of sentiment alignment, personal storytelling, and even personality politics in propelling content to virality.