Creating Comparison Groups for Event Study on Reddit

The algorithms matches reddit users in five steps:

1. Scrape the subreddits of interest

2. Scrape the activities of the users whose posts are included in step 1 (treatment group) across all subreddits

3. Analyze the behavoir of all users to find the most unique subreddit for a given user

4. Scrape posts in the relevant subreddit to find a match (control) for the treatment user

5. Scrape the activities of the control group

Steps 1 & 2 are achieved by scraper.py, Step 3 in unique_sr_finder.py, Step 4 in match_finder.py and Step 5 in control_scraper.py

Instructions

Make sure that you have access to the Reddit API. You will need the 'personal use script' and 'secret'.

Additionally, the script uses praw, psaw, configparser, numpy and pandas modules, so please be sure to install those.

To run the script:

1. Input your Reddit API credentials in the scraperSettings section of config_public.ini

   • personal use script as clientID
   • secret as clientSecret
   • userAgent should be something unique and descriptive

2. Fill in the treatmentSubreddit and change other configurations as you see fit

3. Rename config_public.ini to config.ini

4. Navigate to the root directory in command line

5. chmod +x user_matching.sh to make the script executable

6. ./user_matching.sh to run the script

   • match_finder2.py is a multiprocess version of match_finder.py. Use with caution