Reddit Hemorrhoid Chats Show How Feelings Shift Over Years

People often turn to the internet when they have health problems they feel shy about. Hemorrhoids are one of those topics that many find hard to talk about in person. On Reddit, the community r/hemorrhoids lets users ask questions, share stories, and get support without giving their name.

Researchers pulled all the posts from this subreddit that were made between 2013 and 2022. They started with almost ten thousand raw entries. After cleaning out duplicates and low‑quality messages, they kept 3746 posts that were clear and useful for analysis.

To understand what the conversations were about, they used a tool called BERTopic on the posts from 2019 to 2022 to discover recurring themes. For the emotions, they applied a DistilRoBERTa model that labels each message as neutral, fear, sadness, joy, anger, surprise, or disgust. Then they tracked how those themes and feelings changed month by month and looked at whether certain emotions got more upvotes or comments.

The results showed a split in emotional tone, with the neutral category making up the largest share of posts. Other emotions appeared regularly but in smaller amounts. The identified topics stayed fairly stable over the later years, and posts that carried stronger feelings tended to attract slightly more interaction from other users.