Latent Structure in Collaboration: The Case of Reddit r/place

Abstract

Many Web platforms rely on user collaboration to generate high-quality content: Wiki, Q\&A communities, etc. Understanding and modeling the different collaborative behaviors is therefore critical. However, collaboration patterns are difficult to capture when the relationships between users are not directly observable, since they need to be inferred from the user actions. In this work, we propose a solution to this problem by adopting a systemic view of collaboration. Rather than modeling the users as independent actors in the system, we capture their coordinated actions with embedding methods which can, in turn, identify shared objectives and predict future user actions. To validate our approach, we perform a study on a dataset comprising more than 16M user actions, recorded on the online collaborative sandbox Reddit r/place. Participants had access to a drawing canvas where they could change the color of one pixel at every fixed time interval. Users were not grouped in teams nor were given any specific goals, yet they organized themselves into a cohesive social fabric and collaborated to the creation of a multitude of artworks. Our contribution in this paper is multi-fold: i) we perform an in-depth analysis of the Reddit r/place collaborative sandbox, extracting insights about its evolution over time; ii) we propose a predictive method that captures the latent structure of the emergent collaborative efforts; and iii) we show that our method provides an interpretable representation of the social structure.

Multistability, intermittency, and hybrid transitions in social contagion models on hypergraphs

“…Despite these limitations, there are still many available datasets that are higherorder in nature (i.e., the most natural representation would be a group and not a collection of pairwise interactions), for instance, WhatsApp message exchange in groups (see refs. 46,47 ) or data from Reddit as the collaboration in the social experiment r/place 48 . We remark that, in principle, studying these datasets from the viewpoint of higher-order interactions is possible.…”

With Flying Colors: Predicting Community Success in Large-Scale Collaborative Campaigns

“…Evolving community behaviors, the effect of moderation on Reddit communities, and the different factors that cause a community to evolve are studied in a battery of studies (Weninger, Zhu, and Han 2013;Choi et al 2015;Stoddard 2015;Cunha et al 2016;Fiesler et al 2018;Rappaz et al 2018;Mensah, Xiao, and Soundarajan 2020) to mention just a few. These works address various aspects of community organization as an interest group, the dealings with topics of interest, and the inherent tension between anonymity and identity.…”

“…Müller and Winters (2018) study the experiment from a perspective of how artworks evolve over time and their correlation with the canvas density. Rappaz et al (2018) and Armstrong (2018) introduce an analysis of the latent patterns of collaboration between individuals. Conflicts between communities during the r/place experiment are studied by (Vachher et al 2020), which also releases a dataset of conflict regions and the communities involved in each.…”