memoMedia

This dataset is used to examine the influence of image memorability on social media virality.

Data was fetched from the popular English social media platform Reddit (over 500 million users as of 2024). The collection process was automatically completed by a customized Python scraper script. The data collection targeted acquiring 600 images across three time points, with the first on Apr 19, 2024, the second on Apr 26, 2024, and the third on May 21, 2024. Data from three time points was collected to ensure the replicability of any effects across different attempts. We applied customized functions in the scraper to avoid collecting duplicated posts and unqualified posts based on the criteria in the next paragraph. Overall, 1,248 valid image posts were fetched from Reddit, with 504 images for the first collection, 368 images for the second, and 376 for the third. Posts were selected based on the following criteria: 1) at least five upvotes and five comments to exclude non-informative posts for subsequent analysis; and 2) exactly one image was contained in the post. The data was fetched equally from three general-purpose image subreddits: /r/pics, /r/pic, /r/images, to enhance the generalizability of any effects. These subreddits are communities in Reddit that require all posts to have at least one image and tend to feature images on a variety of topics, such as a photo of a dog with a title like “My dog is 14 years old now!”. All subreddits used in this study are in at least the top 2% of communities ranked by size, with /r/pics being in the top 12. We collected the following data for each post that we fetched: 1) image ID; 2) image URL; 3) number of upvotes; 4) number of comments; 5) top five comments: comment ID, comment score (based on upvotes), and comment body (content); 6) date posted.