A Look Into the World of Reddit with Neural Networks

Creating, placing, and characterizing social media comments and reactions is a challenging problem. This is particularly true for reddit.com, a highly trafficked social media website with thousands of posts per day. Each post has an associated comment thread, and users of Reddit can vote the comments up or down, generating a net score, or ”Karma,” for each comment. Users aspire to collect this ”Karma,” and these comments build the community on Reddit. When reading the content of the comment thread, however, it is often unclear why some comments succeed and receive high Karma while other comments lose Karma. This project explores using Recursive Neural Networks to give better insight into Reddit communities through the sentiment analysis of Reddit comments and Recurrent Neural Networks on Reddit comments to characterize the voting patterns of Reddit users and determine the Karma strength of Reddit comments through identifying comments with positive and negative Karma.