This article empirically revisits the idea of ideological segregation and homogeneity in social networks with an exhaustive analysis of the website Reddit.com. Using a computer-assisted analysis on a corpus of multiple billion comments, it studies the relation between the tone of comments and three political topics, immigration, macroeconomics and defense. Looking at the standard deviation of the average tone of users and communities over time on these specific topics, results show an overall trend toward more ideological heterogeneity as a product of new users’ influx, while multiple communities studied and long-term users show a trend toward homogeneity. Results also show that digital heuristics, such as upvotes and downvotes, illustrate a far greater diversity of opinion than a study solely on published comments could let on.

本文通过对Reddit.com网站的详尽分析，从经验上重新审视了社交网络中的思想隔离和同质性的想法。通过对数十亿评论语料库的计算机辅助分析，它研究了评论语气与三个政治主题（移民，宏观经济学和国防）之间的关系。通过观察这些特定主题下用户和社区的平均语气随时间变化的标准偏差，结果表明，随着新用户涌入，意识形态异质性总体趋势有所提高，而研究的多个社区和长期用户则呈现出趋势走向同质化。结果还表明，数字启发法（例如，投票和降票）说明了比仅对已发表评论进行的研究要宽泛得多的观点多样性。