Learning User Reputation on Reddit

Abstract

The rapid growth of online social networks and the recognition of their potency as a medium for the spread of misinformation has provoked a growing interest in modelling reputation and trust in multi agent networks. Intended as a novel approach towards modelling the effects a user is having on the well-being of an online community, this paper presents a method for extracting features from tree-shaped discussions and evaluates a large set of linguistic and metadata based features for their predictive ability in a data set of Reddit comments. We show that some qualities of discussion-starting comments are predictable based solely on an analysis of the discussion that follows, and outline a road-map for how learning associations between community reactions and detectable antisocial behaviour could be used to model the reputation of users.