Sensitizing Netizen’s behavior through influencer intervention enabled by crowdsourcing–a case of reddit

Abstract

Social news sites have enabled news identification and its promotion through crowdsourcing and provided users with the capabilities to discuss topics. Compared to social media, social news sites are information-rich and possess their own social network. Reddit has been classified as a social news website and possesses similar characteristics to other websites in the domain. These include Slashdot, Digg, and StumbleUpon. This paper provides a broad analysis of spectators’ sentimental (or emotional) behaviour surrounding the 2020 Summer Olympics on Reddit. The study measures the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on spectator sentiments and proposes a scheme for sensitising Redditors’ behaviour by crowdsourcing the influencers present in the Redditor pool.