Investigating Human Values in Online Communities

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable computational method to analyze human values in online communities, specifically Reddit, revealing insights into community-specific and geographically linked values through automated annotation of millions of posts.

Contribution

The authors develop and evaluate classifiers for value relevance and polarity, enabling large-scale analysis of online community values beyond traditional survey methods.

Findings

Negative stance towards conformity in Vegan and AbolishTheMonarchy subreddits

Correlation between traditional values and conservative U.S. states

Automated annotation of over six million posts

Abstract

Studying human values is instrumental for cross-cultural research, enabling a better understanding of preferences and behaviour of society at large and communities therein. To study the dynamics of communities online, we propose a method to computationally analyse values present on Reddit. Our method allows analysis at scale, complementing survey based approaches. We train a value relevance and a value polarity classifier, which we thoroughly evaluate using in-domain and out-of-domain human annotations. Using these, we automatically annotate over six million posts across 12k subreddits with Schwartz values. Our analysis unveils both previously recorded and novel insights into the values prevalent within various online communities. For instance, we discover a very negative stance towards conformity in the Vegan and AbolishTheMonarchy subreddits. Additionally, our study of geographically specific subreddits highlights the correlation between traditional values and conservative U.S. states. Through our work, we demonstrate how our dataset and method can be used as a complementary tool for qualitative study of online communication.