From the post:
We’re software developers and entrepreneurs who wondered what Reddit might be able to tell us about our society.
Social network data have revolutionized advertising, brand management, political campaigns, and more. They have also enabled and inspired vast new areas of research in the social and natural sciences.
Traditional social networks like Facebook focus on mostly-private interactions between personal acquaintances, family members, and friends. Broadcast-style social networks like Twitter enable users at “hubs” in the social graph (those with many followers) to disseminate their ideas widely and interact directly with their “followers”. Both traditional and broadcast networks result in explicit social networks as users choose to associate themselves with other users.
Reddit and similar services such as Hacker News are a bit different. On Reddit, users vote for, and comment on, content. The social network that evolves as a result is implied based on interactions rather than explicit.
Another important difference is that, on Reddit, communication between users largely revolves around external topics or issues such as world news, sports teams, or local events. Instead of discussing their own lives, or topics randomly selected by the community, Redditors discuss specific topics (as determined by community voting) in a structured manner.
This is what we’re trying to harness with Project Austral. By combining Reddit stories, comments, and users with technologies like sentiment analysis and topic identification (more to come soon!) we’re hoping to reveal interesting trends and patterns that would otherwise remain hidden.
Please, check it out and let us know what you think!
Bad assumption on my part! Since ₳ustral uses Neo4j to store the Reddit graph, I was expecting a graph-type visualization. If that was intended, that isn’t what I found. 😉
Most of my searching is content oriented and not so much concerned with trends or patterns. An upsurge in hypergraph queries could happen in Reddit, but aside from references to publications and projects, the upsurge itself would be a curiosity to me.
Nothing against trending, patterns, etc. but just not my use case. May be yours.