Posts and comments on social media are both a good way to measure the opinions and sentiment of the communities they are linked to, and also feed back to shape those communities. In many cases, posts and comments are also explicitly evaluated by users (with upvotes/downvotes or likes). Based on the ratings, a fraction of the posts are highly popular, while the vast majority of them do not elicit any reaction. Several studies have investigated what factors and machine learning models can be used to predict the popularity of a post, but the question remains unresolved. An even more open problem is the prediction of the popularity of comments on posts.

The task of the student is to work on this problem by examining posts on the social networking site Reddit. The task consists of getting familiar with relevant literature, implementing/complementing the related procedures, and investigating new solutions.