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The Anatomy of Reddit: An Overview of Academic Research

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Dynamics On and Of Complex Networks III (DOOCN 2017)

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Complexity ((SPCOM))

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Abstract

Online forums provide rich environments where users may post questions and comments about different topics. Understanding how people behave in online forums may shed light on the fundamental mechanisms by which collective thinking emerges in a group of individuals, but it has also important practical applications, for instance, to improve user experience, increase engagement or automatically identify bullying. Importantly, the datasets generated by the activity of the users are often openly available for researchers, in contrast to other sources of data in computational social science. In this survey, we map the main research directions that arose in recent years and focus primarily on the most popular platform, Reddit. We distinguish and categorize research depending on their focus on the posts or on the users and point to different types of methodologies to extract information from the structure and dynamics of the system. We emphasize the diversity and richness of the research in terms of questions and methods and suggest future avenues of research.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit.

  2. 2.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot.

  3. 3.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News.

  4. 4.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg.

  5. 5.

    https://praw.readthedocs.io/en/latest.

  6. 6.

    The authors used karmadecay.com—the reverse image search tool specifically designed for Reddit.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Concerted Research Action (ARC) supported by the Federation Wallonia-Brussels Contract ARC 14/19-060; Flagship European Research Area Network (FLAG-ERA) Joint Transnational Call “FuturICT 2.0”; and by grant 16-01-00499 of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. naXys, Université de Namur, ICTEAM, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Alexey N. Medvedev

  2. Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Renaud Lambiotte

  3. naXys, Université de Namur, Namur, Belgium

    Renaud Lambiotte

  4. ICTEAM and CORE, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Jean-Charles Delvenne

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  1. Alexey N. Medvedev
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  2. Renaud Lambiotte
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  3. Jean-Charles Delvenne
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Correspondence to Jean-Charles Delvenne .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Theoretical Physics, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Fakhteh Ghanbarnejad

  2. Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Rishiraj Saha Roy

  3. Department of Computational Social Science, GESIS, Leibniz Institute for the Social Science, Köln, Germany

    Fariba Karimi

  4. Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Jean-Charles Delvenne

  5. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India

    Bivas Mitra

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Medvedev, A.N., Lambiotte, R., Delvenne, JC. (2019). The Anatomy of Reddit: An Overview of Academic Research. In: Ghanbarnejad, F., Saha Roy, R., Karimi, F., Delvenne, JC., Mitra, B. (eds) Dynamics On and Of Complex Networks III. DOOCN 2017. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14683-2_9

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