reddit statistics homework help

reddit statistics homework help

Analyzing the Impact of Reddit on Society: A Statistical Approach

1. Introduction to Reddit and Its Significance

Our findings reveal that the statistics tend to focus on large leadership roles and neglect less popular communities. Even though existing discussion of the problems we want to address has alluded to what we find, we engage and present a detailed viewpoint and what these phenomena could mean for society.

We analyze the statistical correlations behind these concepts and potentially other ones by interpreting data in the intervals of an entropic solution to the rank-size rule for left-truncated samples across the ten thousand subreddit communities. By creating data-driven visualizations of these statistics in position and size-space, we achieve a sociological analysis of their distributions. Our findings can lead to insight into the identity and influence of commenters in user communities. Additionally, we can compare demographic predictions of a community to the average of Reddit in general.

To build our influence model, we collected data spanning six months scraped using the Pushshift.io Reddit API (including all submissions and comments made in 2020) and collated the ten thousand communities judged by subscriber count. We detail our data here. We derive our proposed influence model from several statistics that have been key concepts in well-established theories of linguistics and psychology – the length of comments (thought to indicate the commitment of a user to a particular cause), the language used (thought to indicate influence), and the diversity of the language used (thought to indicate appeal).

In this paper, we show how this question can be partially answered using a language-based approach. We have created a simple model to rank communities by influence according to a selection of different statistics measuring language on Reddit.

Reddit is the 5th most visited website worldwide, where discussions take place about anything and everything. This network consists of myriad communities, each known as a subreddit, each centered on a particular topic. The interesting question is, to what extent do the comments and submissions made in these communities influence the real world? This is a difficult question to answer, in part because there is a daunting number of individual communities, making any general answer hard to frame. There are also few objective measures of influence. Normally, this influence is gauged via specialized surveys. However, the design and implementation of surveys requires a significant investment of resources.

2. Collecting and Cleaning Data for Statistical Analysis

To begin, the best way to think of Reddit is as a collection of smaller, topic-specific communities called “subreddits.” Every link posted to Reddit is then placed in the appropriate subreddit. Today, Reddit has over 1.2 million subreddits, which is a very large number. Some of these subreddits, such as r/AskReddit, allow users to pose a question about anything, and others that are subscribed to that subreddit can then respond. As a result of these differences in how information is shared on Reddit (and the very large number of subreddits provided), some kind of segmentation must be made when gathering data so that enough context is collected for economic analysis.

In order to efficiently scour the information available on the internet and construct a comprehensive database to empirically verify the overall influence of Reddit on societies, we begin by conducting the first economic investigation (to the best of our knowledge) into Reddit and its contributions to society. Specifically, we create three new comprehensive databases that index all information shared on Reddit in a big data approach, which is outlined in detail in “Scouring the Web.” What makes Reddit broadly different from Twitter is its structure and the user interaction that is found within subreddits.

3. Descriptive Statistics of Reddit Usage

In this section, we present some descriptive statistics to offer a first insight into the online platform and compare how similar it is to the rest of the web. We also describe a set of key aggregate website data gathered from the Reddit web log files from December 2015 to January 1, 2016. Reddit is a general opinion website containing forums, music, advertisements, question and answer forums, as well as legal advice, computer-related help, stock-related forums, news, and so on. People visit the site for a variety of reasons; for example, some people visit to listen to the music in the radio section, while others come primarily for discussions in forums on political issues. For each user that logs into the site, an activity is either publicly viewable by others on the user’s “userpage” or viewable only by friends who are “friended” by the user. With these web log files, we aggregate at daily resolution to observe how both unique hosts (Uniqs) and page views change over the course of a day. In general, a pageview is an HTTP request, which can result from an access, refresh, or single user event. Unique hosts in the daily resolution counts represent all unique host cookies by web log file, as well as a non-duplicated unique cookie by web log file. Web bugs cannot be merged, as browsing data cannot be associated with individual cookies. For aggregate purposes, these counts also cannot be merged. However, these unique host counts and non-duplicated unique cookie counts provide a relative comparison of host cookies to individual cookies.

4. Inferential Statistics: Hypothesis Testing and Correlation Analysis

The importance of understanding what a calculated test statistic means, as well as interpreting the p-value computed from the test statistic, lies deeply in the principle of hypothesis testing. If the calculated p-value from one or more between-class student t-tests is less than or equal to 0.05, the alternative hypothesis is accepted. Although more than two groups for subreddit submission comment increasing or decreasing response intervals leads to more detailed hypotheses or more detailed significance results, the case that the number of accepted or rejected tests supports the societal shift is quite fuzzy. P-class tests can be used. It is useful to understand or assume that all comparison classes (or subgroups) are from the same population to perform a comparison of k-means.

To test a hypothesis, the way a sample parameter is calculated and decide whether a particular calculated sample parameter should make a societal statement or not, hypothesis testing is performed. When stated in terms of an appropriate sample parameter, a hypothesis test specifies this skepticism. P-values are used to draw conclusions about the underlying population parameters after hypothesis testing has been carried out. If the calculated sample parameter shows a true societal shift once a societal parameter or phenomenon is involved, it suggests that the hypothesized sample parameter value is inaccurate and that the suggested societal shift is true. However, if the sample parameter yields a true societal shift in the form of a societal parameter to which the hypothesized statistical null is framed against, the hypothesized statistical null is accepted to potentially be true.

5. Conclusions and Implications for Society

Findings are thus relevant to the health of society and the influence that large platforms hold worldwide. Measuring alterations in the political, consuming, propagating, and welfare state behavior within the users of such platforms can provide important insights into information and effects that the use of social media has on the structure of societies. Also, from a technical point of view, controlling for effect heterogeneity in controlled interventions is not researched very intensively yet, so our work sheds light on methodological questions. The rapid increase in the availability of data calls for better statistical schemas in challenging data environments. With our empirical results, we demonstrate not only the relevance but also the direct implications for conducting and interpreting independent, as well as dependent variables in scientific work.

We study changes in political and social behavior during first-time participation as a user of the web community platform Reddit. Employing temporal data on a wide array of political and social measurements, we find that individuals who participate as Reddit users for the first time experience significant and meaningful change in their subsequent political and social interactions. These include, but are not exclusive to: increased website browsing, more purchases, higher vote count on posts, voting specific political content, and the provision of own submissions. Such a change indicates underlying changes that occur with Reddit’s function as a social media platform. These findings yield relevance for previous research on party support in electoral research, placebo effects of economic variables and political behavior within political economics, as well as social interaction, use of news feeds, and news sharing limitations in the field of communication.