the launch of Reddit in June 2005, the site has become the 7th most visited in the U.S., and its users have posted billions of comments. Those comments are filled with abbreviations, internet memes and slang, much like the rest of the web, and collectively they form a trove of data about how people use language online. 3 To Note As of the end of 2015, the site’s visitors were mostly 35 or younger, and about 80 percent male according to Google Adwords.
style in comments drives the highest reply rates? Passive, assertive, aggressive, or sarcastic sentiment? 2. What kind of information style drives the highest reply rates? Meforming or informing? 9
billion of their publicly available comments. The full dataset is a crazy 1+ terabyte uncompressed, so Kaggle decided to just share a small portion of the comments from May 2015 for folks like connective media students to tinker with (8GB compressed, 30 GB uncompressed). 13
data and talk about the results ▪ Sentiment Analysis - 4 styles - Aggressive, Assertive, Passive, Sarcastic - Identified keywords that are representative of these communication styles ▪ Meforming versus Informing - Identified keywords which might denote meforming - All other comments are identified as informing 14
between aggression and reply rates is rejected. However, it is clear that there is in fact a positive correlation between aggression and the number of upvotes. 15 Communication Style Analysis Aggressive comments had the highest number of upvotes with a ranking score of 6.45 which is ~11% higher than the second best of assertive comments. In turn, assertive comments had the highest reply rates with nearly 90,000 comments which is 200% better (2x) than the next best of aggressive comments. Sarcasm, in contrast, rarely received high scores.
positive correlation between meforming and reply rates is rejected. Meforming fared much worse when it came to reply rates but surprisingly was slightly higher when it came to number of upvotes. 16 Meforming versus Informing Meforming comments had the highest number of upvotes with a ranking score of 5.68 which is only ~1% higher compared to informing. Informing comments had the highest reply rates with over 1mill comments which is a staggering ~500% higher than meforming.
data and talk about the results ▪ A user on Reddit is more likely to have a higher reply rate for a comment that is assertive and informing. ▪ In turn, it can also be concluded that a user on Reddit is less likely to have a higher reply rate for a comment that is sarcastic and meforming. 17
released these awesome resources for free. 18 ▪ Presentation template by SlidesCarnival ▪ Dataset provided by Kaggle ▪ The brains of Sindhu Babu & Frances Coronel ▪ See our report for academic references