Elliot T. Panek - Understanding Reddit

This book offers a comprehensive scholarly overview of Reddit, one of the most popular and least studied social platforms of the early 21st century.

The book inspires new ways of thinking about Reddit, considering it from multiple perspectives: through a historical lens, as a site where identity is forged, as a democracy, as a community, and as a news aggregator and distributor. By bringing theories from computer-mediated communication, communication studies, and sociology to bear on original, large-scale observational analyses of Reddits communities, this book provides a uniquely comprehensive overview of the platforms first 15 years. Understanding Reddit will help us make sense of how rapidly growing communities function in an era of mass online anonymity.

Serving both as a primer on how social behavior on Reddit plays out, and as a way of locating it within multiple theoretical traditions, the book will offer important insights to scholars and students in the disciplines of communication, media studies, information science, internet and emerging media studies, and sociology.

Elliot T. Panek studies the uses and effects of digital media from sociological and psychological perspectives. He has published research on the social dynamics of online communities, media addiction, and media use and political polarization. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Alabama.

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First published 2022

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2022 Elliot T. Panek

The right of Elliot T. Panek to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Panek, Elliot T., author.

Title: Understanding Reddit / Elliot T. Panek.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021044119 (print) | LCCN 2021044120 (ebook) |

Subjects: LCSH: Reddit (Firm) | Online social networks. | Computer bulletin boards. | Online chat groups. | InternetSocial aspects.

Classification: LCC HM743.R447 P36 2022 (print) | LCC HM743.R447 (ebook) | DDC 302.30285dc23/eng/20211110

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021044119

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021044120

ISBN: 978-0-367-71419-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-71422-2 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-15080-0 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003150800

Typeset in Times New Roman

by codeMantra

2.1 Popular Subreddits: Year of creation, subscriber count, and daily comment count

6.1 Comment distributions across contributors to r/IAmA, r/TwoXChromosomes, and r/CFB in April 2015

6.2 Subscribers and commenters to r/CFB in April 2015

Much of the research and many of the ideas in this book come from my work with the Alabama Reddit Research Group at the University of Alabama. For the past six years, Ive been incredibly fortunate to work with diligent, creative students, fellow faculty, and researchers on a passion project. The abilities and perspectives of this group shaped what I know about Reddit, and I am indebted to them for their contributions: Naiyan Jones, Wyatt Harrison, Jue Hou, Connor Hollenbach, Rebecca Britt, Jinjie Yang, Matthew Gaines, and Tyler Rhodes. I also would like to thank my teachers and mentors for giving me the intellectual foundation that informs how I approach any topic of study: W. Russell Neuman, L. Rowell Heusmann, Joseph Straubhaar, and Sharon Strover. Thank you to my editor Suzanne Richardson at Routledge for having faith in this project. Thank you to my colleagues at the University of Alabama for helping me through the process of writing my first book: Andy Billings, Cory Armstrong, Jeremy Butler, Jessica Maddox, Cynthia Peacock, and Matthew Barnidge. Thank you to my fellow International Communication Association members for stimulating conversations and inspiring research about media technologies: Bree McEwan, Nick Bowman, Catalina Toma, Joe Bayer, Adrienne Massanari, and Anna Gibson. Thank you to my students the ideas you present in your writing and in class discussions are as much a part of my thinking on any topic as the books and articles I read. Thank you to my friends and family, particularly my mother and father for cultivating my curiosity from an early age. And thank you to my wife, Kathryn, for being so supportive, patient, and encouraging, and for the enlightening dinner conversations about what we saw on Reddit that day.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003150800-1

Over its first 15 years, Reddit achieved an unusual kind of popularity. It was as widely used as well-known social media platforms like Twitter (Redditinc.com, 2021) but members of the general public would often claim only to know of it rather than know how it worked or what, exactly, it was. The general publics knowledge drew largely from news coverage of several high-profile instances in which coordinated actions of hundreds of thousands of Reddit users jumped off the platform and disrupted reality: the misidentification of the Boston Marathon bomber; the coalescing of support for then-U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump; stock market volatility precipitated by the day traders of r/wallstreetbets. What is Reddit doing when its not making headlines? How does the whole of Reddit that vast ecosystem of online communities hosting the largest conversations in the history of humanity function?

The purpose of this book is to help scholars, researchers, students, and anyone with an interest in online communities and social media understand Reddit better. For those already familiar with Reddit, the book is intended to inspire new ways of thinking about it. It is chiefly concerned with design and user behavior in the aggregate. It does not treat Reddit as an abstraction or as an unchanging object with a significance or meaning that can be interpreted, but rather as the sum of the actions taken by designers and users over its first 15 years viewed through several prisms.