Dank or Not? -- Analyzing and Predicting the Popularity of Memes on Reddit
This research provides insights into the factors driving meme virality for social media researchers and content creators, particularly during significant global events like the COVID-19 pandemic. This is an incremental contribution to understanding online social dynamics.
This paper analyzes 129,326 memes from Reddit during March 2020 to understand factors influencing their popularity. The study found that meme success can be predicted moderately well based on content, achieving an AUC of 0.68 for viral meme prediction, with both image and textual attributes contributing significant incremental predictive power.
Internet memes have become an increasingly pervasive form of contemporary social communication that attracted a lot of research interest recently. In this paper, we analyze the data of 129,326 memes collected from Reddit in the middle of March, 2020, when the most serious coronavirus restrictions were being introduced around the world. This article not only provides a looking glass into the thoughts of Internet users during the COVID-19 pandemic but we also perform a content-based predictive analysis of what makes a meme go viral. Using machine learning methods, we also study what incremental predictive power image related attributes have over textual attributes on meme popularity. We find that the success of a meme can be predicted based on its content alone moderately well, our best performing machine learning model predicts viral memes with AUC=0.68. We also find that both image related and textual attributes have significant incremental predictive power over each other.