Alex is spot on. Also I would suggest that in /r/politics it may be fruitful to check the individual histories of the "controversial" posts and/or any downvoted posts within any of those threads: unpopular views/posts seem likely to me to be posted either by people who hold consistently unpopular views, or who are trolling (the difference may not be clear). That might give you some metadata to go on. On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 12:29 PM, Alex Leavitt <alexleavitt@gmail.com>wrote:
I've done a lot of work recently with reddit data. It's actually a difficult issue of sampling unless you have access to their backend (which I believe nobody has ever gotten). Unfortunately what you're asking is near impossible.
One thing you can do is sort by "controversial" (though this isn't "most downvoted," it's only the most-even up-to-downvote ratio). Then you can collect via the API the "top 1000" posts (or here, most controversial 1000) by various date lengths (all time, past year, past month, today, etc.).
As far as "near" impossible, if you're interested in a sub other than /r/politics, you can start scraping every single post from a newly created subreddit, so you have a population sample of the posts and their voting scores. But with a long-time, active sub like /r/politics, you can't get past the API limitations.
Alex
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Alexander Leavitt PhD Student USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism http://alexleavitt.com Twitter: @alexleavitt <http://twitter.com/alexleavitt>
On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 11:23 AM, jose marichal <marichal@callutheran.edu
wrote:
Colleagues,
A student of mine is doing a project looking at the most downvoted articles in the sub-reddit "r/politics." Does anyone know of a way to identify the most "downvoted" links on the site?
Many thanks, Jose
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josé marichal, ph.d. | associate professor | political science <http://about.me/marichal> department | california lutheran university 60 w. olsen road | #3800 | thousand oaks, ca 91360 805-493-3328 _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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