Ten Years of Hyperlinks in Online Conversations

Since social media sites have existed, a significant feature of the conversations which take place on them has been links to external websites. Users share videos or photos they have seen, point to products or movies they are interested in, and use external articles as a reference in discussions. Un- derstanding linking behaviour is an important part of un- derstanding the dynamics of online conversations, and iden- tifying the changing interests of participants in these discus- sions. In this paper, we present a study of the hyperlinks posted on a large-scale message board dataset over a ten year period. We analyse the occurrences of hyperlinks and find that the practice of posting links has become more fre- quent over the lifetime of the message board. We examine the domains linked to by users, and see that they change greatly over the years. We focus in particular on the the in- crease of links to resources with associated structured data, and discuss the potential for using this data for enhanced analysis of online conversation.