Regensburg 2022 – wissenschaftliches Programm

Bereiche | Tage | Auswahl | Suche | Aktualisierungen | Downloads | Hilfe

SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 17: Poster

SOE 17.3: Poster

Donnerstag, 8. September 2022, 15:00–18:00, P2

Modelling discussion dynamics across Reddit communities — •Riccardo Carlucci and João Pinheiro Neto — Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Am Faßberg 17, 37077 Göttingen, Germany

Understanding the dynamics of online discussions is an important research challenge, not only in its own right but also in relation to e.g. the study of political polarization. With more than 20 million contributing monthly users, Reddit is one of the largest and most influential social media platforms in the world. Here we analyse the distribution of the number of comments-per-discussion within the largest 500 Reddit communities from an almost fully-sampled dataset, focusing on content created between 2019 and 2021. We find that about 60% of these communities exhibit a distribution which is well-approximated by a power-law with an upper exponential cut-off. However, the width and the exponent of the power-law regime are specific to each particular community. In order to explain this variability we develop a preferential attachment model where the ability of a discussion to attract comments is affected by its age and also by an intrinsic fitness value. After estimating aging and fitness from data, we find that the model is able to reproduce both non-power-law and power-law behaviour. In particular, the width and the exponent of the power-law regime are correlated with the average number of comments and discussion created per day in a community.