voat — Voat discussions (2013-2020)

Description

Networks of the discussions on Voat, a news aggregator and discussion website similar to Reddit, popular with communities banned from other platforms, from its foundation in 2013 until its closure on 25 December 2020. The data were collected by Mekacher and Papasavva from the snapshots of the site in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and from the API of the site, and contain 2.4 million submissions and 16.3 million comments in 7,100 subverses (the communities of the site, as subreddits on Reddit), and the profiles of 113,000 users and of the subverses. There are two networks:

comments: each node is a user, and a directed edge from user $i$ to user $j$ is a comment of $i$ in the discussion of a submission of $j$, with one edge per comment (a multigraph). The data do not give the comment to which a comment replies (only its depth in the discussion tree), so that the edges point to the author of the submission. Users commenting on their own submissions give self-loops.
subverses: a bipartite network of users and subverses, where an edge connects a user to a subverse in which the user posted submissions or comments, or that the user moderated or created (according to the profile of the user), with the numbers of submissions and comments.

The submissions and comments of deleted accounts (with no user name in the data), and those posted anonymously (in the subverses that allowed it, where the user names are replaced by random numbers followed by "?"), have no identifiable author: they are left out of both networks, as are the comments on them in comments. Comments on submissions that are not in the data (3,753) are left out of comments, which thus has 10.8 million of the 16.3 million comments. All the users with a profile are included in both networks, also those without submissions or comments. The texts of the submissions and comments are not included. The times are given in the data as dates and times of the day, taken here as UTC.

The networks have the following properties:

name: the user name, or the name of the subverse.
registered: the registration date of the user (from the user's profile), in Unix time (-1 if unknown, and for subverses).
is_user (subverses only): whether the node is a user (otherwise a subverse).
subscribers (subverses only): the number of subscribers of the subverse (-1 if unknown, and for users).
created (subverses only): the creation time of the subverse, in Unix time (-1 if unknown, and for users).
about (subverses only): the description of the subverse (empty for users).
Edge time (comments only): the time of the comment, in Unix time.
Edge upvotes, downvotes (comments only): the numbers of upvotes and downvotes of the comment.
Edge depth (comments only): the depth of the comment in the discussion (0 for comments on the submission, 1 for replies to these, etc.; -1 if unknown).
Edge subverse (comments only): the subverse of the discussion.
Edge submissions, comments (subverses only): the numbers of submissions and comments of the user in the subverse.
Edge moderator, owner (subverses only): whether the user moderated, or created, the subverse.

Tags

Social Online Communication Multigraph Timestamps Temporal Bipartite Weighted Metadata

Citation

A. Mekacher, A. Papasavva, "'I Can't Keep It Up.' A Dataset from the Defunct Voat.co News Aggregator." Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 16, 1302-1311 (2022) 10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19382 Sci-Hub

Upstream URL OK

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5841668

Upstream license

CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Networks

Tip: click on a column header to sort the list, or hover over it for a description.

Column legend

$\left<k\right>$: Mean degree
$\sigma_k$: Standard deviation of the degrees
$\lambda_h$: Largest eigenvalue of the Hashimoto (non-backtracking) matrix
$\tau$: Random walk mixing time
$r$: Degree assortativity
$c$: Global clustering coefficient
$\oslash$: (Pseudo-) diameter
$S$: Relative size of the largest component
NPs: Node properties
EPs: Edge properties

Name	Nodes	Edges	$\left<k\right>$	$\sigma_k$	$\lambda_h$	$\tau$	$r$	$c$	$\oslash$	$S$	Kind	Mode	NPs	EPs	gt	GraphML	GML	csv
comments	178,524	10,824,806	60.64	1385.41	884.44	4701.51	0.10	0.37	13	0.89	Directed	Unipartite	name registered	time upvotes downvotes depth subverse	64.0 MiB	108.8 MiB	104.0 MiB	93.6 MiB
subverses	204,433	1,060,479	10.37	233.24	453.34	350.09	-0.26	0.00	11	0.93	Undirected	Bipartite	name is_user registered subscribers created about	submissions comments moderator owner	3.7 MiB	8.2 MiB	8.1 MiB	6.8 MiB