Exploring Reddit Community Structure: Bridges, Gateways and Highways

Abstract

Multiple research directions have been proposed to study the information structure of Reddit. One of them is to model inter-subreddit relations but modeling user interactions in the form of a graph. Building upon prior work centered on political subreddits using pre-2020 data, we expand this investigation to include a more extensive dataset spanning 2022 and encompassing diverse topic areas. Employing NLP techniques such as text embeddings, we model subreddit content directly and construct a subreddit graph network based on cosine similarity. Community detection using the Louvain method reveals distinct subreddits and allows the analysis of inter-community connections via previous works’ concepts of “bridges” and “gateways”. Surprisingly, our findings indicate redundancy between bridges and gateways in the utilized dataset. Therefore, we introduce a new concept, “highways”. Highways, representing the most traversed paths between subreddits, unveil insights not captured by previous analyses, underscoring the significance of novel conceptual frameworks in uncovering latent knowledge within Reddit’s online community structures.