Comparative analysis of articulated and behavioural social networks in a social news sharing website

Abstract

This study analyses and contrasts the explicit (articulated) and implicit (behavioural) social networks on the Spanish Digg-like social news website meneame.net. The explicit network is given in the form of declared but not necessarily bidirectional friendship links; the behavioural network is extracted from conversations through comments to the shared links. These two directed social networks and their intersection are analysed and described in detail, which leads to some important conclusions about user behaviour on link sharing websites and online conversation habits in general. We find that reply interactions are more likely to occur between non-friends and that these interactions are (if bidirectional) also more balanced in the case of non-friends. A k-core decomposition of the networks reveals a fundamental difference in the practice of establishing behavioural and articulated links.