An exploration of discussion threads in social news sites: A case study of the Reddit community

Tim Weninger, Xihao Avi Zhu, Jiawei Han

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Social news and content aggregation Web sites have become massive repositories of valuable knowledge on a diverse range of topics. Millions of Web-users are able to leverage these platforms to submit, view and discuss nearly anything. The users themselves exclusively curate the content with an intricate system of submissions, voting and discussion. Furthermore, the data on social news Web sites is extremely well organized by its user-base, which opens the door for opportunities to leverage this data for other purposes just like Wikipedia data has been used for many other purposes. In this paper we study a popular social news Web site called Reddit. Our investigation looks at the dynamics of its discussion threads, and asks two main questions: (1) to what extent do discussion threads resemble a topical hierarchy? and (2) Can discussion threads be used to enhance Web search? We show interesting results for these questions on a very large snapshot several sub-communities of the Reddit Web site. Finally, we discuss the implications of these results and suggest ways by which social news Web site's can be used to perform other tasks.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2013
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages579-583
Number of pages5
ISBN (Print)9781450322409
DOIs
StatePublished - 2013
Event2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2013 - Niagara Falls, ON, Canada
Duration: Aug 25 2013Aug 28 2013

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2013

Other

Other2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2013
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityNiagara Falls, ON
Period8/25/138/28/13

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems

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