Characterizing conversation patterns in reddit: From the perspectives of content properties and user participation behaviors

It becomes the norm for people to communicate with one another through various online social channels, where different conversation structures are formed depending on platforms. One of the common online communication patterns is a threaded conversation where a user brings up a conversation topic, and then other people respond to the initiator or other participants by commenting, which can be modeled as a tree structure. This paper seeks to investigate (i) the characteristics of online threaded conversations in terms of volume, responsiveness, and virality and (ii) what and how content properties and user participation behaviors are associated with such characteristics. To this end, we collect 700 K threaded conversations from 1.5 M users in Reddit, one of the most popular online communities allowing people to communicate with others in the form of threaded conversations. Using the collected dataset, we find that 'social' words, difficulties of texts, and document relevancy are associated with the volume, responsiveness, and virality of conversations. We also discover that large, viral conversations are mostly formed by a small portion of users who are reciprocally communicate with others by analyzing user interactions. Our analysis on discovering user roles in conversations reveal that users who are interested in multiple topics play important roles in large and viral conversations, whereas heavy posting users play important roles in responsive conversations. We expand our analysis to topical communities (i.e., subreddits) and find that news-related, image-based, and discussion-related communities are more likely to have large, responsive, and viral conversations, respectively.