Spikes, Slumps, and Surprises: Tracking r/antiwork’s Viral Growth and Topic Stability
This section examines the changes in posting and commenting activity during increased media coverage, investigates user behavior trends, and analyzes topic distribution over different time periods. All analyses refer to the period from January 1, 2019,…
This section examines the changes in posting and commenting activity during increased media coverage, investigates user behavior trends, and analyzes topic distribution over different time periods. All analyses refer to the period from January 1, 2019, to July 31, 2022, unless stated otherwise. Figures are limited to May 1, 2021, to July 31, 2022, for clarity.
Users can interact with a subreddit by posting, commenting, and voting. This analysis focuses on posting and commenting behavior as Reddit no longer provides voting data to third parties. Figure 2 shows the daily number of posts submitted to r/antiwork that received at least one comment. The average number of posts per day increased steadily from 46.4 in January 2020 to 76.8 in April 2021. From May 2021, posting rates accelerated, reaching over 200 posts per day by September and peaking at 2,658 posts on January 26, 2022. A notable subscriber loss occurred on January 27, 2022.
Commenting behavior followed a similar trend, with an increase in mid-October 2021 and a collapse in late January 2022. Unlike posting, commenting volumes did not exhibit significant differences between weekdays and weekends. Change point detection identified key events influencing these trends.
All analyses refer to the period from January 1, 2019, to July 31, 2022, unless stated otherwise.
Analysis shows that light posters primarily drove posting behavior, with 29.6% of posts, compared to 10.1% by heavy posters. Prior to October 2021, the proportion of posts by light and heavy posters was approximately equal, but diverged thereafter. Heavy commenters made more comments overall, but the average number of comments per post remained consistent over time. Figure 6 indicates that light commenters were more likely to stop commenting after January 2022.
Using topic modeling, we explored how changes in user activity affected r/antiwork's content. The optimal number of topics varied across three time periods, suggesting a broadening of topics over time. Periods 1 and 3 had Quitting as the top topic, while period 2 had Reddit as top-ranking. Each period featured unique topics related to external events and major news stories.
For further details, please refer to the full paper available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license.
Based on reporting by hackernoon.com.