Vote-and-Comment: Modeling the Coevolution of User Interactions in Social Voting Web Sites

In social voting Web sites, how do the user actions - up-votes, down-votes and comments - evolve over time? Are there relationships between votes and comments? What is normal and what is suspicious? These are the questions we focus on. We analyzed over 20,000 submissions corresponding to more than 100 million user interactions from three social voting Web sites: Reddit, Imgur and Digg. Our first contribution is two discoveries: (i) the number of comments grows as a power-law on the number of votes and (ii) the time between a submission creation and a user's reaction obeys a log-logistic distribution. Based on these patterns, we propose VnC (Vote-and-Comment), a parsimonious but accurate and scalable model that models the coevolution of user activities. In our experiments on real data, VnC outperformed state-of-the-art baselines on accuracy. Additionally, we illustrate VnC usefulness for forecasting and outlier detection.