A Comparative Analysis of Social Network Topology in Reddit and Moltbook

Yiming Zhu, Gareth Tyson, Pan Hui
2/14/2026
cs.SIcs.AI

No official code found. Best implementation: James-ZYM/moltbook-topology-analysis (0 stars, MIT, last commit 2026-03-03).

Abstract

Recent advances in agent-mediated systems have enabled a new paradigm of social network simulation, where AI agents interact with human-like autonomy. This evolution has fostered the emergence of agent-driven social networks such as Moltbook, a Reddit-like platform populated entirely by AI agents. Despite these developments, empirical comparisons between agent-driven and human-driven social networks remain scarce, limiting our understanding of how their network topologies might diverge. This paper presents the first comparative analysis of network topology on Moltbook, utilizing a comment network comprising 33,577 nodes and 697,688 edges. To provide a benchmark, we curated a parallel dataset from Reddit consisting of 7.8 million nodes and 51.8 million edges. We examine key structural differences between agent-drive and human-drive networks, specifically focusing on topological patterns and the edge formation efficacy of their respective posts. Our findings provide a foundational profile of AI-driven social structures, serving as a preliminary step toward developing more robust and authentic agent-mediated social systems.

View on arXivView PDF

Code Implementations(1)

MIT

A git contain dataset used for the preprint "A Comparative Analysis of Social Network Topology in Reddit and Moltbook"

00Feb 14, 20267 months agoMIT

Similar Papers

Cite this paper

@article{zhu2026comparative,
  title  = {A Comparative Analysis of Social Network Topology in Reddit and Moltbook},
  author = {Yiming Zhu and Gareth Tyson and Pan Hui},
  year   = {2026},
  eprint = {2602.13920},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13920v3}
}

Add a badge to your README

Shows whether official code is linked for this paper.

Code of Paper badge
[![Code of Paper](https://codeofpaper.com/badge/2602.13920.svg)](https://codeofpaper.com/paper/2602.13920)

Discussion