Investigating the Relationship Between User Specialization and Toxicity on Reddit: A Sentiment Analysis Approach

TL;DR

This study analyzes Reddit user behavior, revealing that specialist users tend to be more toxic and exhibit more negative emotions, while generalists display more positive sentiments, using sentiment analysis and community embeddings.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of user specialization's impact on toxicity and sentiment, using high-dimensional embeddings and a large-scale Reddit dataset.

Findings

Specialist users show higher toxicity levels.

Specialists exhibit more annoyance, sadness, and fear.

Generalists have higher curiosity, admiration, and love scores.

Abstract

Online platforms host a diverse user base, which can be broadly categorized into "specialist users" with focused interests and "generalist users" who engage in a wide range of topics. This study explores the behavioral differences between these two user types on the popular platform Reddit, focusing on the level of toxicity in their posts and the associated sentiment scores across 24 emotional categories and a neutral state. By employing community embeddings to represent users in a high-dimensional space, we measure activity diversity using the GS score. We analyze a dataset of 16,291,992 posts from 4,926,237 users spanning the period from 2019 to 2021, assessing the degree of toxicity and sentiment scores for each post. Our findings indicate that specialist users exhibit higher levels of toxic behavior compared to generalist users. Furthermore, specialist users demonstrate elevated scores for annoyance, sadness, and fear, while generalist users show higher scores for curiosity, admiration, and love. These insights contribute to a better understanding of user behavior on online platforms and can inform strategies for fostering healthier online communities.