SocialPulse: An Open-Source Subreddit Sensemaking Toolkit

TL;DR

SocialPulse is an open-source toolkit that integrates multiple analysis methods to facilitate comprehensive, transparent, and reproducible sensemaking of Reddit communities and discourse dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a unified, extensible platform combining topic modeling, sentiment analysis, user characterization, and bot detection for subreddit analysis.

Findings

Enables fluid exploration of trends and content at multiple granularities

Allows comparison of active and long-tail contributors

Facilitates examination of temporal discourse shifts

Abstract

Understanding how online communities discuss and make sense of complex social issues is a central challenge in social media research, yet existing tools for large-scale discourse analysis are often closed-source, difficult to adapt, or limited to single analytical views. We present SocialPulse, an open-source subreddit sensemaking toolkit that unifies multiple complementary analyses -- topic modeling, sentiment analysis, user activity characterization, and bot detection -- within a single interactive system. SocialPulse enables users to fluidly move between aggregate trends and fine-grained content, compare highly active and long-tail contributors, and examine temporal shifts in discourse across subreddits. The demo showcases end-to-end exploratory workflows that allow researchers and practitioners to rapidly surface themes, participation patterns, and emerging dynamics in large Reddit datasets. By offering an extensible and openly available platform, SocialPulse provides a practical and reusable foundation for transparent, reproducible sensemaking of online community discourse.