{"id":11787,"date":"2016-10-12T03:26:24","date_gmt":"2016-10-12T03:26:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/?p=11787"},"modified":"2024-12-11T01:01:56","modified_gmt":"2024-12-11T01:01:56","slug":"examining-posting-vs-commenting-behaviour-on-reddit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/2016\/10\/12\/examining-posting-vs-commenting-behaviour-on-reddit\/","title":{"rendered":"Examining Posting vs Commenting Behaviour on @reddit with @Tableau"},"content":{"rendered":"

As part of the Social Media Lab\u2019s ongoing efforts to study the changing landscape of social media websites and their communities, in this post we share some of our preliminary data analysis of a popular social news aggregation and discussion site called reddit<\/a><\/strong>. On reddit<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>users can submit content such as text or links, and can also comment or\u00a0vote on the content posted by others. The site\u00a0is\u00a0organized by areas of interest called subreddits <\/em>(think of them as separate online groups).<\/p>\n

\"reddit\"
A front page of reddit, a social news aggregation, rating and discussion site.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Inspired by some of the previous work on mapping\u00a0linkages\u00a0between reddit<\/em>‘s various groups<\/a>,\u00a0we want to better understand the rapidly growing community of over 200M\u00a0reddit<\/em> users<\/a>\u00a0and their posting practices.\u00a0As an initial step,\u00a0we are developing\u00a0a typology of users based on their engagement with the site and others. In particular, we ask\u00a0whether\u00a0there are different types of users on reddit<\/em> and across different subreddits<\/em>.<\/p>\n

For our exploratory analysis we used Tableau<\/a>, a visualization engine\u00a0that helps to summarize and discover interesting patterns\u00a0in structured\u00a0data. The\u00a0subreddits <\/em>that we chose for this analysis were\u00a0\u201cask” subreddits, where users ask and answer questions about various topics from history (r\/AskHistorians\/<\/a>) to astronomy (r\/AskAstronomy\/<\/a>). In total, using\u00a0reddit<\/em>‘s API,\u00a0we have\u00a0collected ~250,000\u00a0publicly available posts and comments submitted to the 13 “ask”\u00a0subreddits <\/em>during the period of one year\u00a0in 2015.<\/p>\n

Below is an interactive visualization\u00a0showing\u00a0 the relationship between posting and commenting behaviour. Each data point\/shape represents a reddit<\/em> user who either asked a question (submitted a post) or answered\/commented on other user’s\u00a0question, or both. The X axis represents the number of posts (~questions) and the\u00a0Y axis represents the number of comments (~answers). Different\u00a0shapes relate to different\u00a0subreddits <\/em>(see the legend to\u00a0the right) and the size of the shape represents the number of likes the user received. We wanted to know if there are groups of\u00a0users who tend to either ask or answer questions\u00a0and why, and\u00a0whether it is different for different\u00a0subreddits<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Note:\u00a0Since we used a logarithmic function to\u00a0reduce the effect of outliers, users who submitted only\u00a0posts or only comments are not visible in this chart.<\/p>\n