Highly engaging events reveal semantic and temporal compression in online community discourse

TL;DR

This study analyzes Reddit conversations to show how real-world events cause online discussions to become more repetitive, emotionally intense, faster, and more publicly active, revealing a consistent pattern of semantic and temporal compression.

Contribution

It uncovers persistent patterns in online discourse that reflect real-world events, linking offline happenings to specific changes in online user behavior and conversation dynamics.

Findings

Conversations become more repetitive and emotionally intense near events.

User activity increases with broader audience engagement during events.

Online discourse exhibits semantic and temporal compression in response to real-world occurrences.

Abstract

People nowadays express their opinions in online spaces, using different forms of interactions such as posting, sharing and discussing with one another. How do these digital traces change in response to events happening in the real world? We leverage Reddit conversation data, exploiting its community-based structure, to elucidate how offline events influence online user interactions and behavior. Online conversations, as posts and comments, are analysed along their temporal and semantic dimensions. Conversations tend to become repetitive with a more limited vocabulary, develop at a faster pace, and feature heightened emotions. As the event approaches, the shifts occurring in conversations are reflected in the users' dynamics. Users become more active and they exchange information with a growing audience, despite using a less rich vocabulary and repetitive messages. The recurring patterns we discovered are persistent across a wide range of events and several contexts, representing a fingerprint of how online dynamics change in response to real-world occurrences.