AI and the Art of Reddit Humor: Mapping Which Countries Joke the Most
Making jokes on the internet is a fine art and Reddit users globally are working diligently to keep the dad jokes coming, because the only thing better than winning an internet argument is winning an internet upvote contest with a punchline your dad would be proud of.
In fact, Reddit's vast reservoir of dad jokes may just be the secret ingredient that helped it reach a staggering $6.4 billion valuation at its recent IPO. Who knew that jokes your dad repeats at every family gathering could be worth their weight in Reddit Gold? But which country attempts to make the highest proportion of jokes in their comment sections?
In this article, we used AI to analyze what percentage of comments from each country's subreddit were (attempted) jokes to see which nations are trying their hardest to have a sense of humor.
We used the Reddit API to obtain the year’s top 50 threads from each country’s subreddit. Then, we retrieved the comments for each of these threads and used AI (Mistral 7B LLM) to classify the top-level comments as “joke” or “not joke” in relation to the thread topic. In total, we covered 352,686 comments from 9,969 threads. Finally, we analyzed the classifications for some interesting insights.
