Davide Vega D'Aurelio

User behavior influences structural properties of growing networks

In this work, we study specific Reddit community, i.e., the /r/AmItheAsshole (AITA) subreddit1, from a temporal network perspective. In this subreddit people post stories about personal experience having ambiguous moral valence asking to other users if, in the narrated story, they have been ”assholes” ore not. This explicit judgement is performed by voting, i.e., writing a comment including a specific acronym corresponding to the judgement one want to express. The subreddit rules, moreover, specify that a brief motivation of the vote should be included in the comment. The explicit request for a judgement is therefore a requirement of this subreddit, which allows researchers to study how humans express moral judgements through sociolinguistic features. In short, we analyze each individual thread as an example of a dynamic process influenced by the behavior of the community, and try to answer the following question: is the structure of the network, and its evolution over time, reflecting different behaviors of the users participating in the conversation? Our analysis shows that the structure of the growing network is different from what the literature would suggest, since it is instead governed by two different processes caused by two different users behaviors.