With over 4M users and 1.5 billon page views per month, Dcard, an anonymous social media is now one of the most influential social network platform in Taiwan. In this article, I will use web scraping data from 201901–202004 (around 830,000 articles) to briefly analyze user activity on Dcard and how users of different genders behave respectively toward different topics.
Some of the interesting findings include:
1. Women are the major content creators
Among around 830,000 articles, 60% (500,010) of them come from female users while 38% (318,951) are from male. Although due to anonymity on Dcard, it is difficult to tell if this is caused by a higher female user ratio or female users are generally more engaged and active on Dcard.
2. “Mood” and “Relationship” are two popular topics on Dcard….but men prefer to talk about “Politics”
The forum “Mood,” where users share feelings and stories is the most popular forum that contribute to around 11% of all posts on Dcard (here I define popular as having more posts.) It follows by the forum “Relationship” that people discuss and seek relationship advice from one another. Besides these two, other popular forums include Talk, Sex, Current Affairs, Makeup and Horoscope.
If we rerank popularity by genders, we can see that besides mood and relationship, women are more interested in topics related to Makeup, Horoscope, Entertainers, Traveling and Fashion. As for men, “Current Affair” where people share their opinions about news and politics become the most popular forum that rank above mood and relationship. We can also see that men show more interests in forums such as Sex, Electronics, Vehicles, Photography, Finance and Workout.
3. Men and Women want differently for electronics
Here I use the forum “Electronics” and analyze tags labeled by Dcard for each article, trying to see if men and women show different preferences or considerations when it comes to electronics devices.
As we can see, Cell Phone and Laptop are two highly discussed products for both genders, however, women appears to mention more about iPhone, apps like LINE/instagram and mobile accessory such as headset and phone case.
Compared to women, Computer is a much bigger topic among men. Hardware including CPU, Graphic card, disks are also often mentioned in posts.
For further analysis, I use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to do topic modeling for posts by both men and women on Electronics forum. LDA model will assume a fixed number of topics among all the articles, each topic can be represented by a set of words, then it can map individual article to the most relevant topic based on words used in that article.
Here I set to have 5 topics as output in our LDA models. And I categorized the result as followed:
Men’s topics: 1.Computer 2. Cell Phone 3.Laptop 4. System 5. Hardware
Women’s topics: 1.Computer 2.Cell Phone 3. Laptop 4. System 5. Function
For both men and women, there are product-centered topics including Computer, Cell Phone and Laptop. System related issues such as data backup, logins, system upgrade is also identified as one topic for both genders. The difference is discussion about hardware is big enough to be recognized as an individual topic from men’s posts, while for women the last topic focus more on functions like photos, video, music.
A deeper dive into a topic also tell us more about different things men and women value regarding particular products. For example, within the topic “Computer,” relevant terms for male users are software, computer fan, keyboard, games and graphics. But for women, relevant terms for computer are monitor, games, binge watch, reports, and word processing. We can clearly see that men and women have different needs toward computer. Seems like men expect a high performance computer that creates great experience for gaming while women look for computer that aims for work/school and video watching. Therefore, an ideal computer for them might look quite different since it is made for different purposes.
Conclusion
Information like these could be very insightful for business. Not only for telling the differences between men and women, social media activities can also tell us about how different segment of users behave and their interests as well as behavior patterns. We will explore more on that next time!
- Check here for more details https://github.com/peiyuT/NLP-projects
