Identifying social roles in reddit using network structure

Abstract

As social networks and the user-generated content that populates them continue to grow in prevalence, size, and influence, understanding how users interact and produce this content becomes increasingly important. Insight into these community dynamics could prove valuable for measuring content trust, providing role-based group recommendations, or evaluating group stability and growth. To this end, we explore user posting behavior on reddit, a large social networking site comprised of many sub-communities in which a user may participate simultaneously. We demonstrate that the well-known "answer-person" role is present in the reddit community, provide an exposition on an automated method for identifying this role based solely on user interactions (foregoing expensive content analysis), and show that users rarely exhibit significant participation in more than one communities.