Human Psychology of Common Appraisal: The Reddit Score

The Reddit score reflects a common appraisal by a community of Reddit subscribers of a submitted item, called a story. The general random walk with random maximum boundary is demonstrated to describe the distribution function of the Reddit score of an arbitrary story in the online social news aggregator Reddit.com. Exponential tails, predicted by the analysis, are observed, while a curious intermediate “power law-like” region seems to correspond to a remarkable empirical observation that the total number of downvotes depends in “power law” fashion on the total number of upvotes. Stronger even, those downvotes increase faster than the upvotes, which is a surprising fact that asks for a (socio-psychological?) explanation.