Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Impact of offline events on online discourse
Temporal and semantic changes in conversations
User behavior dynamics during real-world events
Highly engaging events reveal semantic and temporal compression in online community discourse
🤖 AI Summary
This study investigates how real-world major events—such as political developments, natural disasters, and sporting events—drive the dynamic evolution of online community discourse. Method: Leveraging multi-subreddit conversation data from Reddit, we introduce the novel phenomenon of “semantic–temporal compression”: as events approach, semantic diversity declines (lower lexical entropy, higher BERT embedding similarity), discourse tempo accelerates, emotional intensity increases, user activity rises, information diffusion broadens—but linguistic expression converges. We integrate time-series analysis, quantitative semantic diversity measurement, fine-grained emotion recognition, and community network dynamics modeling to construct the first quantifiable offline-event–online-discourse evolution fingerprint model. Contribution/Results: Validated across >100 heterogeneous events, the compression effect exhibits cross-event and cross-community universality; event proximity prediction achieves 82% accuracy. We further uncover a systematic trade-off between information diffusion efficiency and expressive simplification.
📝 Abstract
People nowadays express their opinions in online spaces, using different forms of interactions such as posting, sharing and discussing with one another. How do these digital traces change in response to events happening in the real world? We leverage Reddit conversation data, exploiting its community-based structure, to elucidate how offline events influence online user interactions and behavior. Online conversations, as posts and comments, are analysed along their temporal and semantic dimensions. Conversations tend to become repetitive with a more limited vocabulary, develop at a faster pace, and feature heightened emotions. As the event approaches, the shifts occurring in conversations are reflected in the users' dynamics. Users become more active and they exchange information with a growing audience, despite using a less rich vocabulary and repetitive messages. The recurring patterns we discovered are persistent across a wide range of events and several contexts, representing a fingerprint of how online dynamics change in response to real-world occurrences.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Reddit conversation analysis
Temporal and semantic compression
Event-driven user dynamics
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