Visualizing Temporal Sub-Reddit Relationships
Pavlos Evangelatos, Mathijs Kappetijn, Michiel de Ruiter, Martin Schvarcbacher and Juan Agustin Tibaldo
Fig. 1. Main view of our project showing all the design
Index Terms—Reddit, subreddit relationships, visualization
1 I NTRODUCTION
Social networks have went through a large surge in popularity since
2008, from when they saw exponential growth [4]. These social net-
works can provide a vast amount of data about their users and the
communication patterns they display. Analyzing this data can require
using specialized data mining and visualization tools. In this paper,
we present a method of visually analyzing temporal graph data from
one popular social network and show how this can be generalized to
other similar networks.
We focus on analyzing the SNAP dataset of Reddit [3], which con-
tains 2 and half years of user generated data collected from Reddit.
Reddit is an open communication and link sharing platform, where
users can share links to content located on the internet, including on
different parts of Reddit itself, which are called subreddits. The dataset
we use focuses on cataloging posts which link from Reddit back to
Reddit itself and adds a common set of attributes to this data. This
includes the overall sentiment of the source post, where users voted on
whether the given post is positive or negative. Furthermore, each post
has a Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) score [6], which can
be used to classify the post’s content. This dataset is temporal and
represents a directed graph.
Our visualization tool focuses on showing the relationships between
different Reddit communities by analyzing their interactions. This is
Manuscript received 20 Mar. 2020;
done by looking at what are the most referenced communities from
another one, measuring the volume of incoming and outgoing posts
along with their attributes. The users can also observe changes over
time in these communities, taking advantage of the temporal nature
of the dataset. Lastly, the users can select one or more communities
and compare them on several aspects, such as their readability, ratio
of incoming to outgoing posts and overall sentiment. This provides a
comparison of how different subreddits are perceived by other com-
munities.
Our tool aims to enable the visual exploration of the different re-
lationships between multiple Reddit communities and see their inter-
actions. Additionally, we enable the comparison of multiple of these
observed communities based on several pre-defined features to find
any similarities between them.
The main contributions of our paper are:
• We present how to visualized sentiment data for temporal di-
rected graphs and how to use this for determining the relation-
ships between different communities.
• We present a way to compare features of Reddit communities
and how they evolve over time.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2
presents the related work to our paper. Section 3 describes how we
use our analytical visualization tool to analyze the relationships be-
tween Reddit communities. Section 4 presents our results and which
insights were gained. Finally, we conclude the paper in Section 5.
2 R ELATED W ORK
Kerracher et al. [2] discuss different approaches to visualizing tempo-
ral graph data. They categorize these approaches based on how the
time is encoded and how the graph structure is represented. The time
aspect can be made into a new dimension and then only certain time
slices are displayed. This is the approach we have taken. Another ap-
proach is to consider time as a graph node itself, which the authors
call embedded time, as time becomes part of the graph representa-
tion. The most widely used graph representation is the node-link and
matrix representation combined with sequential time view. The paper
also briefly discusses how these approaches can be mixed to produce
different visualizations.
Farrugia et al. [1] present a tool for visual exploration of temporal
graph data. They use two different views on temporal network data. A
matrix view is used for visualizing changes over time in the network
and node view (network view) to view static snapshots of the network
at a given point in time. The matrix view represents the main screen,
from which nodes of interest can be selected for further analysis. The
matrix view also supports an animation over time of the changes in the
data. Our visualization approach is different, in that we start with the
network view showing an aggregation of data for a given time frame,
giving the user an option to further restrict this time interval up to daily
increments.
Park et al. [5] combine visualization and text mining to find pat-
terns in subreddits related to mental health. Their work focuses on
taking data from only 3 subreddits and grouping the main topics and
keywords from posts in these subreddit using natural language pro-
cessing. The information gained is then visualized using word clouds
(most common themes) and then these word clouds are connected with
each other to form a network view to show the relationships between
these words. A second view is a heatmap of the topics in different
subreddits. Our work is different in that we do not focus on topics
discussed in a subreddit and model the interactions between the sub-
reddits. Here the authors did not investigate the interactions between
the observed communities and only studied them in isolation and com-
pared their features.
3 V ISUALIZING C OMMUNITY R ELATIONSHIPS
Our visualization is composed of one central screen, which the dis-
plays all of the major information at a glance. The users can select the
time range that is relevant to their interest, or play section by section
an animation of how the flow changes over time. To further inspect a
community, the user can then click on one or more subreddits to view
additional information about them.
Timeline navigation To represent the temporal nature of our data,
we segment the data into discreet intervals with a lowest resolution of
1 day. The bar chart represents an overall volume of posts per given
time interval and at the same time serves as a navigation to select only
a specific time range for the overall visualization. Figure 2 shows the
overall design of the timeline navigation. This timeline is a central
piece of the visualization and is present in all views, as it provides the
contextual information of which time period is being visualized. The
timeline is also a way to control the flow of time animation, which
enables the users to see the changes over time on the main network
view.
Fig. 2. Timeline showing the range of the data to be analyzed
Network view The network view is the main visualization screen
displayed by Figure 3, where we display the relationships between the
different subreddits. The search functionality is a way to center the
subreddit of interest, based on its name or topic and brings it into the
central focus. Here the lines represent the existence of a relationship
between the two subreddits, which are represented as the graph nodes.
The thickness of the lines represents the relative volume of posts com-
pared to others currently displayed (i.e. not an absolute scale). This
enables quick identification of the strongest connections between com-
munities as indicated by the number of interactions. The color scale
of the line represents the average sentiment between the subreddits. If
the overall post sentiment is negative, the colors approach red tones,
whereas more positive sentiments result in green tones. This com-
bination of colors enables the users to quickly determine the overall
sentiment without having to click on any extra parts of the graph. The
size of the node indicates the amount of subscribers, and the colors
of the nodes are used for visual distinction. Further information can
be then accessed by selecting the subreddit node, going into the radar
view described in the next paragraph.
Fig. 3. Network view showing the relationships between different sub-
reddits
Radar view The radar view is a secondary screen that can be ac-
cessed by selecting one or more subreddits from the network view,
as seen in Figure 4. This view serves to further explore attributes of
selected subreddits. From this, the user can view the relationship be-
tween the relative ratio of incoming and outgoing posts, readability
level and other attributes. The side by side comparison enables gain-
ing insights into what are the differences between subreddits and find
any similarities in the patterns. The radar view provides the easiest vi-
sual comparison of these different features and the colors differentiate
multiple selected subreddits.
Search View A search bar provides an additional functionality
of seeking for a specific subreddit and its interconnections. When a
user provides an input key, a network where the specific subreddit is
placed as the central node is returned. Moreover, the links that connect
it with every other subreddit that they mentioned or referred each other
are appeared.
4 R ESULTS
Our tool was tested within the team of the paper’s authors. The tool
can be used to find how communities interact and what are their dif-
ferences. For example, in Figure 1, we can see that community ’sub-
redditdrama’ interacts with a lot of other subreddits, mainly in one di-
rection. This could be because ’subredditdrama’ mostly links to other
 dits and directly compare them to gain further insight. Our paper made
the following contributions: we present a way to explore relationships
in temporal graph data and present ways this can be extended to other
data sets outside of Reddit.

R EFERENCES
[1] M. Farrugia and A. Quigley. Tgd: Visual data exploration of temporal
graph data. volume 7243, page 724309, 01 2009.
[2] N. Kerracher, J. Kennedy, and K. Chalmers. The design space of temporal
graph visualisation. In EuroVis (Short Papers), 2014.
[3] J. Leskovec and A. Krevl. SNAP Datasets: Stanford large net-
work dataset collection. http://snap.stanford.edu/data/
soc-RedditHyperlinks.html, June 2014.
[4] E. Ortiz-Ospina. The rise of social media. https://
ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media. Accessed:
2020-03-15.
[5] A. Park, M. Conway, and A. T. Chen. Examining thematic similarity, dif-
ference, and membership in three online mental health communities from
reddit: a text mining and visualization approach. Computers in human
behavior, 78:98–112, 2018.
[6] J. W. Pennebaker, M. E. Francis, and R. J. Booth. Linguistic inquiry
and word count: Liwc 2001. Mahway: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
71(2001):2001, 2001.

Fig. 4. Radar view enabling the comparison of one or more subreddits

and their features

Fig. 5. The network of the typed subreddit leagueoflegends

subreddits. The color of the line also indicates that the sentiment is
on the negative side. This can be explained because many posts from
’subredditdrama’ links to other subreddits in time of drama. On further
comparison using the radar view, we can see that indeed the outgoing
volume is high and the sentiment is below average.
This visualization approach can be modified to suit other data which
is both temporal and graph based with multiple attributes. The time-
line navigation can support any temporal data and be the key for the
navigation and displaying changes over time. The network view can be
adapted to display different attributes between nodes using line thick-
ness and colors. Lastly, the popup radar view can display any ordinal
values. These values can be converted to a ratio for an easy compari-
son.

5 C ONCLUSION
We have created a tool which can be used to explore the different rela-
tionships within the Reddit communities over time. The users are able
to visualize the amount of total volume of posts overall for a given
time frame and then explore these relationships as they evolved over
time or view them all on an aggregated level. Furthermore, the user
can select to view additional information about the observed subred-