RedNet, a different perspective of Reddit

Abstract

Modern social media frequenters traditionally surround themselves around specific topics or interests, like a television show or sport, which breeds interaction with the people who you have mutual interests with. This is prevalent in social networks like Facebook where users like certain pages that are oriented around a topic, or Twitter users that tag their tweets using hashtags to illustrate a subject, and users of Reddit do the a similar thing with topic-specific sub-categories called subreddits. There are almost 400,000 subreddits which cover almost any category leading Reddit to label itself the "front page of the internet". Our interest in Reddit inclines us to ask: RQ1: Do popular comments, submissions, and subreddits have centrality measures proportional to their karma? RQ2: Does content defined as popular according to Reddit tend to cluster and fall in the same area in the network as other popular content? We expected to find that karma is directly proportional to centrality measures and that all popular content nodes will fall in the same general area as each other. If content is popular in a social network, it tends to have great influence which allows us to predict this.