Co-Comment Network: A Novel Approach to Construct Social Networks within Reddit

Abstract

This work analyzes the online Reddit comments and proposes a novel approach to construct a social network automatically within Reddit that connects users to it. The investigation reveals that users tend to form links to others who have a mutual interest in interacting with some topics or posts. This mutual interest among users can make connections among them in the network. This study shows that Reddit contains a large, strongly connected core of high-degree nodes, surrounded by many small clusters of low-degree nodes which the authors define as the Co-Comment network. One of the important research focuses is to examine whether the networks built from the Reddit comments show the desirable social network properties, e.g., power-law distribution, small-world effect, and clustering coefficient. Results obtained from the experiment confirm that the Co-Comment network conforms to social network properties. The authors also discover communities within the Co-Comment network and verify them to validate the constructed network.