DerStandard is a major Austrian newspaper, online user can post below news articles

We created a dataset from the platform that spans ten years (2013–2022)

Includes over 75 million user comments, more than 400 million votes and detailed metadata, also on articles and user interactions

All in a nicely organised data repository: https://dataverse.bsc.es/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=perma:BSC/P32CXW

Structured conversation threads, explicit up- and downvotes of user comments, editorial topic labels, …

To ensure user privacy, all persistent identifiers are anonymized using salted hash functions, and the raw comment texts are not publicly shared.

Instead, we release pre-computed vector representations of all postings derived from a state-of-the-art embedding model.

We work on providing researcher access to the full text for specific research projects

To date, the largest and most longitudinal data set of online interactions “in the wild” with explicit signs (no proxy measures)

We provide convenience data too, for example pre-computed information on user activity or (ideological) user factions identified in earlier research for a subset of power users

We are very happy also if you like to explore collaborations –> https://emmafrax.github.io/

A lot of text from in the wild in the mid-resourced language German

Time frame covers many contentious (political) events, for example migration in 2015, breakdown of the national government in 2019, COVID-19

Also, user level analyses (over time) can be interesting for many research questions

Topic tags chosen by the platform on the article level can for example be used to validate topic models

The data set also contains the text and votes of deleted users, an interesting rare feature that can be exploited for interesting research questions

and and and

Please, use the data set!