Towards Operational Validation of LLM-Agent Social Simulations: A Replicated Study of a Reddit-like Technology Forum

Aleksandar Tomašević; Darja Cvetković; Sara Major; Slobodan Maletić; Miroslav Anđelković; Ana Vranić; Boris Stupovski; Dušan Vudragović; Aleksandar Bogojević; Marija Mitrović Dankulov

arXiv · 2508.21740

Towards Operational Validation of LLM-Agent Social Simulations: A Replicated Study of a Reddit-like Technology Forum

Aleksandar Tomašević·Darja Cvetković·Sara Major·Slobodan Maletić·Miroslav Anđelković·Ana Vranić·Boris Stupovski·Dušan Vudragović·Aleksandar Bogojević·Marija Mitrović Dankulov

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Abstract

Validation of LLM-agent social simulations remains underdeveloped, with most studies relying on subjective assessments or single runs. We address this gap by running 30 independent 30-day simulations of a technology forum modeled on Voat's v/technology, using stateless Dolphin Mistral 24B agents on the Y Social platform, and evaluating operational validity across five dimensions: activity patterns, network structure, toxicity, topical coverage, and stylistic convergence. Against 30 matched, non-overlapping 30-day Voat comparison windows, results show overlapping 99% confidence intervals for unique users, root posts, and daily active users, while comments, average thread length, and mean toxicity remain higher in simulation. Both simulated and empirical networks exhibit core-periphery structure, though simulated cores are larger and more diffuse and repeated interactions are less frequent. Topic alignment is near-complete, but toxicity is misallocated across content layers: simulated root posts are substantially more toxic than real submissions, while simulated comments are less toxic than Voat comments. These findings demonstrate that LLM agents in platform-faithful environments can reproduce familiar online regularities, while systematic divergences, particularly those linked to stateless agent design and content-layer calibration, point to concrete directions for future improvement.

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Aleksandar Tomašević, Darja Cvetković, Sara Major, Slobodan Maletić, Miroslav Anđelković, Ana Vranić, Boris Stupovski, Dušan Vudragović, Aleksandar Bogojević, Marija Mitrović Dankulov. 2025-08-29. Towards Operational Validation of LLM-Agent Social Simulations: A Replicated Study of a Reddit-like Technology Forum. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21740

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