Anonymous Hyperlocal Communities: What do they talk about?

TL;DR

This study analyzes the content of anonymous hyperlocal online communities in Saudi Arabia, revealing diverse topics, community-specific preferences, and varying reactions to different types of posts.

Contribution

It introduces a new content classification schema for assessing intent and topic in hyperlocal anonymous posts and applies it to a large dataset from Saudi Arabia.

Findings

Benign and controversial topics are prevalent, mainly related to information, entertainment, and dating.

Topic popularity varies between Riyadh and Jeddah, indicating local community differences.

Community reactions differ by topic, with entertainment receiving more votes but fewer replies.

Abstract

In this paper, we study what users talk about in a plethora of independent hyperlocal and anonymous online communities in a single country: Saudi Arabia (KSA). We base this perspective on performing a content classification of the Jodel network in the KSA. To do so, we first contribute a content classification schema that assesses both the intent (why) and the topic (what) of posts. We use the schema to label 15k randomly sampled posts and further classify the top 1k hashtags. We observe a rich set of benign (yet at times controversial in conservative regimes) intents and topics that dominantly address information requests, entertainment, or dating/flirting. By comparing two large cities (Riyadh and Jeddah), we further show that hyperlocality leads to shifts in topic popularity between local communities. By evaluating votes (content appreciation) and replies (reactions), we show that the communities react differently to different topics; e.g., entertaining posts are much appreciated through votes, receiving the least replies, while beliefs & politics receive similarly few replies but are controversially voted.