These interest-based devices provide structure to the growing worlds of social media, and are essential for the long-term success of social media platforms because they make these big worlds feel small and navigable.
For example, Facebook users subscribe to topic-specific “pages” ( Strand, 2011), Twitter users classify their tweets using topic-specific “hashtags” ( Chang, 2010), users bookmark links with topic-specific tags ( Golder & Huberman, 2006 Halpin, Robu & Shepherd, 2007), and reddit users post and subscribe to topic-specific sub-forums called “subreddits” ( Gilbert, 2013). Social media users typically organize themselves around specific interests, such as a sports team or hobby, which facilitates interactions with other users who share similar interests. In the past decade, social media platforms have grown from a pastime for teenagers into tools that pervade nearly all modern adults’ lives ( Rainie & Wellman, 2012). We suggest that the integration of interest maps into popular social media platforms will assist users in organizing themselves into more specific interest groups, which will help alleviate the overcrowding effect often observed in large online communities. Moreover, we analyze the network properties of the reddit social network and find that it has a scale-free, small-world, and modular community structure, much like other online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. To demonstrate the method, we build an interest map for the social news web site reddit and show how such a map could be used to navigate a social media world. Here, we report on a method using the backbone of a network to create a map of the primary topics of interest in any social network. However, navigating these massive worlds and finding topics of specific interest often proves difficult because the worlds are mostly organized haphazardly, leaving users to find relevant interests by word of mouth or using a basic search feature.
In the massive online worlds of social media, users frequently rely on organizing themselves around specific topics of interest to find and engage with like-minded people. Navigating the massive world of reddit: using backbone networks to map user interests in social media. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Computer Science) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited. 2 Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA DOI 10.7717/peerj-cs.4 Published Accepted Received Academic Editor Massimiliano Zanin Subject Areas Network Science and Online Social Networks, Visual Analytics Keywords Social networks, reddit, Mapping, Network backbone extraction, Social network navigation Copyright © 2015 Olson and Neal Licence This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed.
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