Subreddit Temporal Network: An Interactive Web Interface
Resumo
Reddit is a social media platform driven by community interactions rather than direct relationships between users; interaction happens through subforums called subreddits. This structure can be modeled as a temporal network of subreddits linked by shared users, evolving as users’ interests and participation shift over time. However, temporal analysis of such data as a network is still limited by existing visualization tools’ support for exploring change over time. This work models Reddit as a temporal network of subreddits organized into communities and builds on it an interactive web interface for exploring the network and its communities over time. Such a tool supports researchers and community analysts in identifying when a community grows, fragments, or shifts its structural core.
Palavras-chave:
Complex Network, Data Visualization, Reddit, Temporal Networks, Web Tool
Referências
Yong-Yeol Ahn, Seungyeop Han, Haewoon Kwak, Sue Moon, and Hawoong Jeong. 2007. Analysis of topological characteristics of huge online social networking services. In Proc. of the International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW). 835–844.
Réka Albert and Albert-László Barabási. 2002. Statistical mechanics of complex networks. Reviews of modern physics 74, 1 (2002), 47.
Benjamin Bach, Emmanuel Pietriga, and Jean-Daniel Fekete. 2013. Graphdiaries: Animated transitions andtemporal navigation for dynamic networks. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 20, 5 (2013), 740–754.
Lars Backstrom, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, and Xiangyang Lan. 2006. Group formation in large social networks: membership, growth, and evolution. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 44–54.
Albert-László Barabási and Réka Albert. 1999. Emergence of scaling in random networks. Science 286, 5439 (1999), 509–512.
Alain Barrat, Marc Barthelemy, Romualdo Pastor-Satorras, and Alessandro Vespignani. 2004. The architecture of complex weighted networks. Proc. of the National Academy of Sciences 101, 11 (2004), 3747–3752.
Mathieu Bastian, Sebastien Heymann, Mathieu Jacomy, et al. 2009. Gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating networks. Icwsm 8, 2009 (2009), 361–362.
Jason Baumgartner, Savvas Zannettou, Brian Keegan, Megan Squire, and Jeremy Blackburn. 2020. The pushshift reddit dataset. In Proc. of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Vol. 14. 830–839.
Gabor Csardi and Tamas Nepusz. 2005. The Igraph Software Package for Complex Network Research. InterJournal Complex Systems (2005), 1695.
Linton C Freeman. 1977. A set of measures of centrality based on betweenness. Sociometry (1977), 35–41.
Diletta Goglia and Davide Vega. 2024. Structure and dynamics of growing networks of Reddit threads. Applied Network Science 9, 1 (2024), 48.
Jeffrey Gottfried and Eugenie Park. 2025. Americans’ Social Media Use 2025. [link]. Accessed: 2026-07-05.
Roger Guimera and Luís A Nunes Amaral. 2005. Cartography of complex networks: modules and universal roles. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment 2005, 02 (2005), P02001.
Aric A Hagberg, Daniel A Schult, and Pieter J Swart. 2008. Exploring network structure, dynamics, and function using NetworkX. In Proc. of the Python in Science Conference. 11–15.
William Hamilton, Justine Zhang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Dan Jurafsky, and Jure Leskovec. 2017. Loyalty in online communities. In Proc. of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, Vol. 11. 540–543.
Ivan Herman, Guy Melançon, and M Scott Marshall. 2000. Graph visualization and navigation in information visualization: A survey. IEEE Transactions on visualization and computer graphics 6, 1 (2000), 24–43.
Petter Holme and Jari Saramäki. 2012. Temporal networks. Physics reports 519, 3 (2012), 97–125.
Sohyeon Hwang and Jeremy D Foote. 2021. Why do people participate in small online communities? Proc. of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5, CSCW2 (2021), 1–25.
Paul Jaccard. 1901. Étude comparative de la distribution florale dans une portion des Alpes et des Jura. Bull Soc Vaudoise Sci Nat 37 (1901), 547–579.
Jing Jiang, Christo Wilson, XiaoWang, Wenpeng Sha, Peng Huang, Yafei Dai, and Ben Y Zhao. 2013. Understanding latent interactions in online social networks. ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB) 7, 4 (2013), 1–39.
Sanjay Ram Kairam, Dan J Wang, and Jure Leskovec. 2012. The life and death of online groups: Predicting group growth and longevity. In Proc. of the ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. 673–682.
Pushwitha Krishnappa, Lance Lindner, Eduardo Pasiliao, and Tathagata Mukherjee. 2024. Identifying NSFW groups on Reddit social network by identifying highly interconnected subreddits through analysis of implicit communication patterns. Applied Sciences 14, 24 (2024), 11665.
Jure Leskovec and Christos Faloutsos. 2006. Sampling from large graphs. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 631–636.
Lance Lindner. 2023. Analysis of Interconnected Subreddits on the Reddit Social Network. The University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Noah Makow, Matt Millican, and Chenyao Yu. 2017. A Network Model for Reddit Post Virality Prediction. (2017).
Humphrey Mensah, Lu Xiao, and Sucheta Soundarajan. 2020. Characterizing the evolution of communities on reddit. In International Conference on Social Media and Society. 58–64.
Alan Mislove, Massimiliano Marcon, Krishna P Gummadi, Peter Druschel, and Bobby Bhattacharjee. 2007. Measurement and analysis of online social networks. In Proc. of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Internet Measurement. 29–42.
James Moody, Daniel McFarland, and Skye Bender-deMoll. 2005. Dynamic network visualization. American journal of sociology 110, 4 (2005), 1206–1241.
Randal S Olson and Zachary P Neal. 2015. Navigating the massive world of reddit: Using backbone networks to map user interests in social media. PeerJ Computer Science 1 (2015), e4.
Elliot Panek, Connor Hollenbach, Jinjie Yang, and Tyler Rhodes. 2018. The effects of group size and time on the formation of online communities: Evidence from Reddit. Social Media+ Society 4, 4 (2018), 2056305118815908.
Gale H Prinster, C Estelle Smith, Chenhao Tan, and Brian C Keegan. 2024. Community archetypes: An empirical framework for guiding research methodologies to reflect user experiences of sense of virtual community on Reddit. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 8, CSCW1 (2024), 1–33.
Reddit, Inc. 2026. Reddit. [link]. Accessed: 2026-07-12.
Yuqing Ren, F Maxwell Harper, Sara Drenner, Loren Terveen, Sara Kiesler, John Riedl, and Robert E Kraut. 2012. Building member attachment in online communities: Applying theories of group identity and interpersonal bonds1. MIS quarterly 36, 3 (2012), 841–863.
Jon Roozenbeek and Adrià Salvador Palau. 2017. I read it on reddit: Exploring the role of online communities in the 2016 us elections news cycle. In International Conference on Social Informatics. 192–220.
Jan Sawicki and Maria Ganzha. 2024. Exploring Reddit community structure: Bridges, gateways and highways. Electronics 13, 10 (2024), 1935.
Jan Sawicki, Maria Ganzha, Marcin Paprzycki, and YutakaWatanobe. 2023. Reddit CrosspostNet—studying Reddit communities with large-scale Crosspost graph networks. Algorithms 16, 9 (2023), 424.
Jan Sawicki, Maria Ganzha, Marcin Paprzycki, and Yutaka Watanobe. 2024. Applying named entity recognition and graph networks to extract common interests from thematic subfora on Reddit. Applied Sciences 14, 5 (2024), 1696.
Stephen B Seidman. 1983. Network structure and minimum degree. Social Networks 5, 3 (1983), 269–287.
M Ángeles Serrano, Marián Boguná, and Alessandro Vespignani. 2009. Extracting the multiscale backbone of complex weighted networks. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences 106, 16 (2009), 6483–6488.
Ahmed Soliman, Jan Hafer, and Florian Lemmerich. 2019. A characterization of political communities on reddit. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT). 259–263.
Steven H Strogatz. 2001. Exploring complex networks. nature 410, 6825 (2001), 268–276.
Chenhao Tan and Lillian Lee. 2015. All who wander: On the prevalence and characteristics of multi-community engagement. In Proc. of the International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW). 1056–1066.
Nathan TeBlunthuis, Charles Kiene, Isabella Brown, Laura Levi, Nicole McGinnis, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2022. No community can do everything: why people participate in similar online communities. Proc. of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 6, CSCW1 (2022), 1–25.
Vincent A Traag, Ludo Waltman, and Nees Jan Van Eck. 2019. From Louvain to Leiden: guaranteeing well-connected communities. Scientific reports 9, 1 (2019), 5233.
Isaac Waller and Ashton Anderson. 2021. Quantifying social organization and political polarization in online platforms. Nature 600, 7888 (2021), 264–268.
Duncan J Watts and Steven H Strogatz. 1998. Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’networks. nature 393, 6684 (1998), 440–442.
Jason Shuo Zhang, Brian Keegan, Qin Lv, and Chenhao Tan. 2021. Understanding the diverging user trajectories in highly-related online communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Proc. of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, Vol. 15. 888–899.
Réka Albert and Albert-László Barabási. 2002. Statistical mechanics of complex networks. Reviews of modern physics 74, 1 (2002), 47.
Benjamin Bach, Emmanuel Pietriga, and Jean-Daniel Fekete. 2013. Graphdiaries: Animated transitions andtemporal navigation for dynamic networks. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 20, 5 (2013), 740–754.
Lars Backstrom, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, and Xiangyang Lan. 2006. Group formation in large social networks: membership, growth, and evolution. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 44–54.
Albert-László Barabási and Réka Albert. 1999. Emergence of scaling in random networks. Science 286, 5439 (1999), 509–512.
Alain Barrat, Marc Barthelemy, Romualdo Pastor-Satorras, and Alessandro Vespignani. 2004. The architecture of complex weighted networks. Proc. of the National Academy of Sciences 101, 11 (2004), 3747–3752.
Mathieu Bastian, Sebastien Heymann, Mathieu Jacomy, et al. 2009. Gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating networks. Icwsm 8, 2009 (2009), 361–362.
Jason Baumgartner, Savvas Zannettou, Brian Keegan, Megan Squire, and Jeremy Blackburn. 2020. The pushshift reddit dataset. In Proc. of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Vol. 14. 830–839.
Gabor Csardi and Tamas Nepusz. 2005. The Igraph Software Package for Complex Network Research. InterJournal Complex Systems (2005), 1695.
Linton C Freeman. 1977. A set of measures of centrality based on betweenness. Sociometry (1977), 35–41.
Diletta Goglia and Davide Vega. 2024. Structure and dynamics of growing networks of Reddit threads. Applied Network Science 9, 1 (2024), 48.
Jeffrey Gottfried and Eugenie Park. 2025. Americans’ Social Media Use 2025. [link]. Accessed: 2026-07-05.
Roger Guimera and Luís A Nunes Amaral. 2005. Cartography of complex networks: modules and universal roles. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment 2005, 02 (2005), P02001.
Aric A Hagberg, Daniel A Schult, and Pieter J Swart. 2008. Exploring network structure, dynamics, and function using NetworkX. In Proc. of the Python in Science Conference. 11–15.
William Hamilton, Justine Zhang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Dan Jurafsky, and Jure Leskovec. 2017. Loyalty in online communities. In Proc. of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, Vol. 11. 540–543.
Ivan Herman, Guy Melançon, and M Scott Marshall. 2000. Graph visualization and navigation in information visualization: A survey. IEEE Transactions on visualization and computer graphics 6, 1 (2000), 24–43.
Petter Holme and Jari Saramäki. 2012. Temporal networks. Physics reports 519, 3 (2012), 97–125.
Sohyeon Hwang and Jeremy D Foote. 2021. Why do people participate in small online communities? Proc. of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5, CSCW2 (2021), 1–25.
Paul Jaccard. 1901. Étude comparative de la distribution florale dans une portion des Alpes et des Jura. Bull Soc Vaudoise Sci Nat 37 (1901), 547–579.
Jing Jiang, Christo Wilson, XiaoWang, Wenpeng Sha, Peng Huang, Yafei Dai, and Ben Y Zhao. 2013. Understanding latent interactions in online social networks. ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB) 7, 4 (2013), 1–39.
Sanjay Ram Kairam, Dan J Wang, and Jure Leskovec. 2012. The life and death of online groups: Predicting group growth and longevity. In Proc. of the ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. 673–682.
Pushwitha Krishnappa, Lance Lindner, Eduardo Pasiliao, and Tathagata Mukherjee. 2024. Identifying NSFW groups on Reddit social network by identifying highly interconnected subreddits through analysis of implicit communication patterns. Applied Sciences 14, 24 (2024), 11665.
Jure Leskovec and Christos Faloutsos. 2006. Sampling from large graphs. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 631–636.
Lance Lindner. 2023. Analysis of Interconnected Subreddits on the Reddit Social Network. The University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Noah Makow, Matt Millican, and Chenyao Yu. 2017. A Network Model for Reddit Post Virality Prediction. (2017).
Humphrey Mensah, Lu Xiao, and Sucheta Soundarajan. 2020. Characterizing the evolution of communities on reddit. In International Conference on Social Media and Society. 58–64.
Alan Mislove, Massimiliano Marcon, Krishna P Gummadi, Peter Druschel, and Bobby Bhattacharjee. 2007. Measurement and analysis of online social networks. In Proc. of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Internet Measurement. 29–42.
James Moody, Daniel McFarland, and Skye Bender-deMoll. 2005. Dynamic network visualization. American journal of sociology 110, 4 (2005), 1206–1241.
Randal S Olson and Zachary P Neal. 2015. Navigating the massive world of reddit: Using backbone networks to map user interests in social media. PeerJ Computer Science 1 (2015), e4.
Elliot Panek, Connor Hollenbach, Jinjie Yang, and Tyler Rhodes. 2018. The effects of group size and time on the formation of online communities: Evidence from Reddit. Social Media+ Society 4, 4 (2018), 2056305118815908.
Gale H Prinster, C Estelle Smith, Chenhao Tan, and Brian C Keegan. 2024. Community archetypes: An empirical framework for guiding research methodologies to reflect user experiences of sense of virtual community on Reddit. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 8, CSCW1 (2024), 1–33.
Reddit, Inc. 2026. Reddit. [link]. Accessed: 2026-07-12.
Yuqing Ren, F Maxwell Harper, Sara Drenner, Loren Terveen, Sara Kiesler, John Riedl, and Robert E Kraut. 2012. Building member attachment in online communities: Applying theories of group identity and interpersonal bonds1. MIS quarterly 36, 3 (2012), 841–863.
Jon Roozenbeek and Adrià Salvador Palau. 2017. I read it on reddit: Exploring the role of online communities in the 2016 us elections news cycle. In International Conference on Social Informatics. 192–220.
Jan Sawicki and Maria Ganzha. 2024. Exploring Reddit community structure: Bridges, gateways and highways. Electronics 13, 10 (2024), 1935.
Jan Sawicki, Maria Ganzha, Marcin Paprzycki, and YutakaWatanobe. 2023. Reddit CrosspostNet—studying Reddit communities with large-scale Crosspost graph networks. Algorithms 16, 9 (2023), 424.
Jan Sawicki, Maria Ganzha, Marcin Paprzycki, and Yutaka Watanobe. 2024. Applying named entity recognition and graph networks to extract common interests from thematic subfora on Reddit. Applied Sciences 14, 5 (2024), 1696.
Stephen B Seidman. 1983. Network structure and minimum degree. Social Networks 5, 3 (1983), 269–287.
M Ángeles Serrano, Marián Boguná, and Alessandro Vespignani. 2009. Extracting the multiscale backbone of complex weighted networks. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences 106, 16 (2009), 6483–6488.
Ahmed Soliman, Jan Hafer, and Florian Lemmerich. 2019. A characterization of political communities on reddit. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT). 259–263.
Steven H Strogatz. 2001. Exploring complex networks. nature 410, 6825 (2001), 268–276.
Chenhao Tan and Lillian Lee. 2015. All who wander: On the prevalence and characteristics of multi-community engagement. In Proc. of the International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW). 1056–1066.
Nathan TeBlunthuis, Charles Kiene, Isabella Brown, Laura Levi, Nicole McGinnis, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2022. No community can do everything: why people participate in similar online communities. Proc. of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 6, CSCW1 (2022), 1–25.
Vincent A Traag, Ludo Waltman, and Nees Jan Van Eck. 2019. From Louvain to Leiden: guaranteeing well-connected communities. Scientific reports 9, 1 (2019), 5233.
Isaac Waller and Ashton Anderson. 2021. Quantifying social organization and political polarization in online platforms. Nature 600, 7888 (2021), 264–268.
Duncan J Watts and Steven H Strogatz. 1998. Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’networks. nature 393, 6684 (1998), 440–442.
Jason Shuo Zhang, Brian Keegan, Qin Lv, and Chenhao Tan. 2021. Understanding the diverging user trajectories in highly-related online communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Proc. of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, Vol. 15. 888–899.
Publicado
11/09/2026
Como Citar
MOTA, Gabriel; SILVEIRA, Sabrina A.; REIS, Julio C. S..
Subreddit Temporal Network: An Interactive Web Interface. In: WORKSHOP DE VISUALIZAÇÃO, EVOLUÇÃO E MANUTENÇÃO DE SOFTWARE (VEM), 14. , 2026, São Paulo/SP.
Anais [...].
Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação,
2026
.
p. 89-95.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/vem.2026.32952.
