  Online discussions are valuable resources to study user behaviour on a
diverse set of topics. Unlike previous studies which model a discussion in a
static manner, in the present study, we model it as a time-varying process and
solve two inter-related problems -- predict which user groups will get engaged
with an ongoing discussion, and forecast the growth rate of a discussion in
terms of the number of comments. We propose RGNet (Relativistic Gravitational
Nerwork), a novel algorithm that uses Einstein Field Equations of gravity to
model online discussions as `cloud of dust' hovering over a user spacetime
manifold, attracting users of different groups at different rates over time. We
also propose GUVec, a global user embedding method for an online discussion,
which is used by RGNet to predict temporal user engagement. RGNet leverages
different textual and network-based features to learn the dust distribution for
discussions.
  We employ four baselines -- first two using LSTM architecture, third one
using Newtonian model of gravity, and fourth one using a logistic regression
adopted from a previous work on engagement prediction. Experiments on Reddit
dataset show that RGNet achieves 0.72 Micro F1 score and 6.01% average error
for temporal engagement prediction of user groups and growth rate forecasting,
respectively, outperforming all the baselines significantly. We further employ
RGNet to predict non-temporal engagement -- whether users will comment to a
given post or not. RGNet achieves 0.62 AUC for this task, outperforming
existing baseline by 8.77% AUC.
