Understanding Characteristics of Catalyst Users in the WallStreetBets Community
Authors: 
Ehsan-Ul Haq, Yiming Zhu, Zijun Lin, Haodi Weng, Gareth Tyson, Lik-Hang Lee, Reza Hadi Mogavi, Tristan Braud, Pan HuiAuthors Info & Claims
Pages 320 - 324
Abstract
WallStreetBets (WSB), a Reddit community, impacted stock markets during the 2021 GameStop Short Squeeze. We examine the content and user properties that influence engagement in WSB. Despite WSB's association with emojis and informal terms, engagement among community members depends on more than surface-level factors. Although emojis are commonly used, they are not as effective at fostering interactions among users. Community members engage more with posts that have longer and topic-specific text. Simply producing a high volume of posts is not enough to attract an audience. Consistent topical focus, reciprocal interactions, and previous authorship of catalyst posts influence engagement. WSB posts, regardless of length, generally remain relevant to the community's theme of stock trading. Our findings provide insights into WSB engagement patterns and can be useful for downstream research, such as financial predictive tasks using WSB data.
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Index Terms
- Understanding Characteristics of Catalyst Users in the WallStreetBets Community
Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.
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Published: 15 March 2024
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