Investigating Reddit to detect subreddit and author stereotypes and to evaluate author assortativity

Abstract

In recent years, Reddit has attracted the interest of many researchers due to its popularity all over the world. In this article, we aim at providing a contribution to the knowledge of this social network by investigating three of its aspects, interesting from the scientific viewpoint, and, at the same time, by analysing a large number of applications. In particular, we first propose a definition and an analysis of several stereotypes of both subreddits and authors. This analysis is coupled with the definition of three possible orthogonal taxonomies that help us to classify stereotypes in an appropriate way. Then, we investigate the possible existence of author assortativity in this social medium; specifically, we focus on co-posters, that is, authors who submitted posts on the same subreddit.