Will Buzzwords Give You Online Popularity?
Short Version:
I scraped Reddit (a popular chat-forum site) to see if using certain words in your post’s title makes it more popular.
Turns out it does!
Technologies Involved: Python, PRAW (Python Reddit API Wrapper)
Long Version:
I used PRAW (a Reddit API wrapper) to pull information from Askreddit. First, I grabbed the “titles” of the first 5000 posts under each tab (New, Hot, Top). The title of an AskReddit post is the question that the poster asks the community. I processed the title strings by stripping the punctuation and splitting each word into a separate string. Then, I ran the string through a function that sorts the top 100 most frequent strings into a dictionary. The dictionary’s keys are the strings, and the values are how many times the string shows up in the first 5000 posts under a tab.
I compared the popular posts to the general posts in AskReddit by analyzing the posts under the Top/Hot tabs, then comparing them to those under the New tab. By disregarding the words common to both sections, I’m able to see the unique “buzzwords” in the popular posts.
Here are my findings:
