Attracting Attention in Online Health Forums: Studies of r/Alzheimers and r/dementia

Informal caregivers increasingly use social media for means of information sharing and social support. We study the attention received by healthcare related social media posts, particularly the r/Alzheimers and r/dementia subreddits with the aim of better understanding the user experience on such forums, possibly leading to improvements of their effectiveness. We explore how the linguistic features of a post relate to the amount of attention it receives in terms of votes and comments, focusing on the content, grammar, and sentiment of the text. Unlike traditional approaches that analyze forum activity on each user, we analyze each post as an entity to decipher what makes it influential. We do n-gram and word frequency analysis on the text to compare high- and low-attention posts, then define and calculate attention measures for each post before applying correlation analysis between attention measures and post features. We perform topic modelling analysis on the posts and examine the correlation relationships between a post’s major topic and the amount of attention it receives. Our topic analysis of the posts, along with our n-gram and word frequency analysis, also infer themes of discussion within the subreddits.