Figure 1

Tree structure of Reddit conversations. (A) Reddit users can write posts to initiate a conversation and can comment (reply) to posts or other comments. A sentiment score between \(-1\) and \(+1\) (negative and positive, respectively) can be computed for each post and comment. (B) The conversation on the social network can be represented by a forest of trees, where each post is the root of a tree and subsequent comments represent its branches. (C) Trees can be used to extract a user-user network, where a link from user i to user j represents the number of times i commented to posts/comments by user j. (D) Cumulative count of trees larger than a given size (in terms of number of comments) for different months in the considered time span of data. (E) Cumulative count of users that contributed more than a given number of posts/comments during different months. (F, G) Sample representation of the forest of tree conversations for January 21, 2021 and March 19, 2020, respectively. Icons in (A–C) have been designed by Freepik. The schematic representation of a reddit post in (A) has been recreated by the authors. The network representations on (F, G) have been created by the authors using the software Gephi.