Extroversion and Homophily Patterns in a Reddit Community

(Bandiera Marlia L., De Ponti A., Garofalo P., Gori G. M.)

Previous research has documented the existence of an extroversion bias (popularity and homophily effect) in real-life social networks. In this paper, we explore these phenomena in an online social network (OSN), by studying the activity of 27K Reddit users (19K introverts and 8K extroverts) and 500K comments posted over 3 years.
We examine the presence of popularity effect using different frameworks: centrality distribution analysis, network resilience, and role discovery. The two groups present similar behaviour within the network, thus excluding this phenomenon.
Then, we evaluate the presence of homophily patterns using community detection and the conformity measure. Both approaches point to extroverts having higher heterophilic tendencies and introverts having higher homoplilic tendencies.