We performed statistical analysis on data from the Digg.com website, which enables its users to express their opinion on news stories by taking part in forum-like discussions as well as directly evaluate previous posts and stories by assigning so called "diggs". The results of the distribution of the discussions (thread) give evidence of behaviour directly connected to the circadian rhythm. Moreover, there is also power-law behaviour both in the comments and user activity histograms. On the other hand the distribution of diggs seems to have its origin in two, quite different processes: preferential attachment for small and medium numbers of diggs, leading to a power-law and random selection for large numbers of diggs, resulting in a Gaussian-like shape.

Owing to fact that the content of each post has been annotated with its emotional value, apart from the strictly structural properties, the study also includes an analysis of the average emotional response of the posts commenting the main story. While analysing correlations at the story level, an interesting relationship between the number of diggs and the number of comments received by a story was found. The correlation between the two quantities is high for data where small threads dominate and consistently decreases for longer threads. However, while the correlation of the number of diggs and the average emotional response tends to grow for longer threads, correlations between numbers of comments and the average emotional response are almost zero. We also show that the initial set of comments given to a story has a substantial impact on the further "life" of the discussion: high negative average emotions in the first 10 comments lead to longer threads while the opposite situation results in shorter discussions.

• Legal notice:
  

  Copyright (c) Pielaszek Research, all rights reserved.
  The above materials, including auxiliary resources, are subject to Publisher's copyright and the Author(s) intellectual rights. Without limiting Author(s) rights under respective Copyright Transfer Agreement, no part of the above documents may be reproduced without the express written permission of Pielaszek Research, the Publisher. Express permission from the Author(s) is required to use the above materials for academic purposes, such as lectures or scientific presentations.
  In every case, proper references including Author(s) name(s) and URL of this webpage: https://science24.com/paper/23329 must be provided.

1. How are World Events Similar to Contagions?
2. Sentiment and activity analysis of Manchester United football forum
3. Online discussions modelled by an evolving Ising-like dynamics
4. Sentiment and activity analysis of Manchester United football forum.
5. Entropy-growth-based model of emotionally charged online dialogues
6. Observations and analysis  of the origins of lognormal distributions of  user post lengths in  Internet discussions
7. Analysis and simulation of emotional states in Internet communities
8. Negative emotions as a fuel for discussion in cyber communities
9. External bias in the model of isolation of communities
10. Nonequilibrium phase transition due to social group isolation
11. Scaling of clusters in a one-dimensional system
12. Networks of companies and branches in Poland
13. Log-periodic oscillations in degree distributions of hierarchical scale-free networks