Existing studies of how information diffuses across social networks have thus far concentrated on analysing and recovering the spread of deterministic innovations such as URLs, hashtags, and group membership. However investigating how mentions of real-world entities appear and spread has yet to be explored, largely due to the computationally intractable nature of performing large-scale entity extraction. In this paper we present, to the best of our knowledge, one of the first pieces of work to closely examine the diffusion of named entities on social media, using Reddit as our case study platform. We first investigate how named entities can be accurately recognised and extracted from discussion posts. We then use these extracted entities to study the patterns of entity cascades and how the probability of a user adopting an entity (i.e. mentioning it) is associated with exposures to the entity. We put these pieces together by presenting a parallelised diffusion model that can forecast the probability of entity adoption, finding that the influence of adoption between users can be characterised by their prior interactions -- as opposed to whether the users propagated entity-adoptions beforehand. Our findings have important implications for researchers studying influence and language, and for community analysts who wish to understand entity-level influence dynamics.
Prior work on Reddit has examined the site's evolution since launch, seeing it evolve from a bulletin-like page to a large community site with many segragated and unique sub-communities that reinforce a general perception of the overall community @cite_22 . This observation supports the use of Reddit as a study venue for information diffusion, finding that communities are large, well-defined, and cohesive. Later work covers the mapping of popular content @cite_26 and of network structure @cite_13 , though not the diffusion of information through those networks.
@cite_26 @cite_13 @cite_22
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In the past few years, Reddit -- a community-driven platform for submitting, commenting and rating links and text posts -- has grown exponentially, from a small community of users into one of the largest online communities on the Web. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the most comprehensive longitudinal study of Reddit's evolution to date, studying both (i) how user submissions have evolved over time and (ii) how the community's allocation of attention and its perception of submissions have changed over 5 years based on an analysis of almost 60 million submissions. Our work reveals an ever-increasing diversification of topics accompanied by a simultaneous concentration towards a few selected domains both in terms of posted submissions as well as perception and attention. By and large, our investigations suggest that Reddit has transformed itself from a dedicated gateway to the Web to an increasingly self-referential community that focuses on and reinforces its own user-generated image- and textual content over external sources. Many online communities ask their members to do work for the good of everyone on the site. On social voting sites like Reddit, this means that users judge a stream of incoming links by voting them up or down. The links with the most up-votes bubble up to the main page, pointing everyone toward the best content. A threat to all sites designed this way, however, is underprovision: when too many people rely on others to contribute without doing so themselves. In this paper, we present findings suggesting that widespread underprovision of votes is happening on Reddit, arguably the internet's largest social voting community. Notably, Reddit overlooked 52 of the most popular links the first time they were submitted. This suggests that many potentially popular links get ignored, jeopardizing the site's core purpose. We conclude by discussing possible reasons behind it, and suggest future research on social voting sites. Platforms like Reddit have attracted large and vibrant communities, but the individuals in those communities are free to migrate to other platforms at any time. History has borne this out with the mass migration from Slashdot to Digg. The underlying motivations of individuals who migrate between platforms, and the conditions that favor migration online are not well-understood. We examine Reddit during a period of community unrest affecting millions of users in the summer of 2015, and analyze large-scale changes in user behavior and migration patterns to Reddit-like alternative platforms. Using self-reported statements from user comments, surveys, and a computational analysis of the activity of users with accounts on multiple platforms, we identify the primary motivations driving user migration. While a notable number of Reddit users left for other platforms, we found that an important pull factor that enabled Reddit to retain users was its long tail of niche content. Other platforms may reach critical mass to support popular or mainstream topics, but Reddits large userbase provides a key advantage in supporting niche topics.