#over active bigotry not like. niche discourse opinions.

[radioreprise]

makes fun of kat for going online specifically to get mad at shitty people being shitty. turns around and has to set my phone down and take some deep breaths to convince myself not to tell someone to kill themself on anon. iwasnicetoday.gif

[mediamattersmore-blog]

A Place to Belong: An Analysis of Reddit

Reddit is one of the most popular social media sites in existence, with an estimated 250 million users making it the eighth most popular website on the Internet (alexa.com). The site combines news and media aggregation, content rating, and community building features to create some akin to a bulletin board system, catering for a wide variety of interests while generating a culture of its own. Reddit’s numerous affordances have enabled the creation of individual communities with their own norms, while at the same time generating possibilities for social surveillance of the wider user base. While some of these have led to unintended and even negative consequences, there is no denying that Reddit is a popular platform for those looking for a place to belong.

This is what the front page of Reddit typically looks like:

Reddit’s structure is designed so that the interests of an individual user define their experience with the site. Content is divided into categories, called “subreddits”, which are devoted to individual topics with varying levels of mass appeal. There are currently over one million subreddits. Once a user is registered, they can subscribe to subreddits that align with their interests and submit content such as links to external webpages, images, videos, or “self” text posts. These submissions are then voted on by other “redditors” using an “upvote/downvote” system; the most popular recent posts are shown on a subreddit’s front page. The front page of Reddit itself shows popular posts from the subreddits a user is subscribed to, while /r/all aggregates the most popular content from the entire website. Posts can be commented on by registered users; individual comments are also able to be voted upon. Some of the most popular subreddits take advantage of the site’s features, such as /r/IAmA, which is dedicated to open question-and-answer sessions with notable or interesting people using the comment system:

The site has numerous policies and guidelines which dictate what kinds of content can be posted and how users are expected to behave. “Reddiquette” is perhaps the most important of these, as it is “an informal expression of the values of many redditors, as written by redditors themselves”; users are generally expected to follow these guidelines for the benefit of others, although it is not necessarily compulsory. Reddiquette is a standard of good behaviour and post quality which would generally go unsaid on most other social media services, set by the community to keep Reddit an enjoyable platform to use. Notably, the first guideline is to “remember the human”, an acknowledgement that although Reddit’s users are generally anonymous, they are real people with real feelings, and thus posts and comments should reflect a certain level of empathy. Subreddits are policed by volunteer moderators who have a range of tools and near total discretion as to the enforcement of sitewide and subreddit-specific rules, including reddiquette. Moderators generally monitor subreddits for anything which breaches reddiquette or the subreddit’s own rules, while administrators hired by Reddit assist moderators and authorise punishments for serious breaches.

The culture that has emerged from Reddit, as well as the individual cultures of each subreddit, can be considered a kind of cultural field, defined by Schirato et al as “a series of institutions, rules, rituals, conventions, categories, designations, appointments and titles which constitute an objective hierarchy, and which produce and authorise certain discourses and activities” (21-22). Essentially, the structures in place encourage the building of a community, complete with certain normative practices acted upon by users such as memes. Because subreddits are devoted to a single topic, they can be reflective of other cultural fields, such as fandoms for sports and artistic endeavours, usually adopting the norms of using Reddit while retaining their own distinct habitus. Much of Reddit’s appeal lies in the fact that a subreddit can foster a user’s “sense of belonging, as well as a feeling of validation when a submission or a comment is upvoted” (Anderson); many subreddits are indeed welcoming towards new users who may not necessarily understand reddiquette or the expectations of that particular subreddit.

This image is of /r/SquaredCircle, a subreddit devoted to professional wrestling - an example of a niche community fostered through Reddit:

The “upvote/downvote” system of Reddit is tied to a unique feature which serves as a form of social capital, known as “karma”. Whenever a user posts a link or makes a comment, it generates a score by calculating the number of upvotes minus the number of downvotes; as an example, if a post has five upvotes but two downvotes, it has a score of two. The post’s score is then added to the contributing user’s overall karma scores; the scores for links and comments are kept separate from each other. “Self” text posts cannot generate karma, no matter how many votes such a post may receive. A user’s karma scores are displayed publicly on their profile page, which contains every post and comment that user has made. While some have characterised karma as being little more than “meaningless internet points”, others can become obsessed with maintaining their karma scores, whether through posting high amounts of content or providing less frequent content that is of a higher quality. Such high quality posts can also be recognised through a system called “Reddit Gold”, a premium membership which costs US$3.99 and gives access to a number of features, such as removing advertisements, custom avatars and an exclusive subreddit; Gold is frequently gifted to users for an exceptionally high quality post, known as “gilding”.

Karma can be considered a form of social surveillance because it is a way for Reddit users to monitor each other. While the use of anonymous usernames differentiates Reddit from other social media services which are “designed for users to continually investigate digital traces left by the people they are connected to”, such as family and close friends, posts there are nevertheless still “broadcast to be looked at, and as such, people can look closely”, as a person’s interests and opinions can be discerned from the subreddits they post on and the posts themselves (Marwick). Social capital is normally an intangible quality, but a karma score makes it tangible by putting a numerical value on a user and their actions. A high karma score will generally indicate that a user has a level of popularity among other users, and indicates that they consistently contribute in a positive manner to discussions; some subreddits even require a user to have a certain amount of karma before they are allowed to post there. Respectively, a low or even negative karma score may indicate several things: usually that a user is relatively new to the website, but also that their contributions are seen to have little value by others and are thus to be avoided.

Reddit’s core features have a number of affordances, or “possibilities that they offer for action” (Hutchby 447), that have established the website’s reputation. It should be noted that an affordance is not the feature itself — it is the interpretation of how the feature is meant to be used by a user, such as a handle on a cup providing an affordance for holding. Perhaps the most obvious example of where affordances can be seen in Reddit is in the upvote/downvote system. Reddiquette maintains that the purpose of the system is to acknowledge posts and comments which “contribute to conversation” and to disavow posts which “[do] not contribute to the subreddit it is posted in or [are] off-topic in a particular community”. However, it is all too easy to see the downvote button in particular as a “disagree” button, which someone can use to try and bury posts or comments which they do not like or agree with; the inverse can also be said for the upvote button. While such an interpretation might be frowned upon or indeed seen as an abuse of the system, the design of the voting tools (usually in the form of arrows) makes such a reading possible, since a downwards arrow is frequently interpreted outside of Reddit as a sign of disapproval. 

The subreddit system affords the opportunity to build a community around a topic, even those which some may find distasteful, offensive or even dangerous. A frequent criticism of subreddits Is that they tend to develop a herd-like mentality or hivemind, where one view on a topic is dominant even if opposing views may help to contribute to discussion. This has led to situations where subreddits based around legally questionable or otherwise controversial material have been allowed to flourish. A recent example can be seen with /r/The_Donald (WARNING: OFFENSIVE CONTENT WITHIN), a subreddit dedicated to supporting Donald Trump originally created for his 2016 presidential campaign. The subreddit’s rules were generally lax with regards to racism and other forms of bigotry, and its moderators would generally ban anyone who did not “fit in” with the views the subreddit’s members generally held. r/The_Donald would gain notoriety when it manipulated Reddit’s voting system in order to get its posts onto the website’s front page, to the frustration of many users who did not support Trump or were otherwise not engaged with politics, to the point where Reddit changed its algorithm to make the subreddit less visible. While many subreddits can be insular, /r/The_Donald was toxic to the point that many wanted the subreddit banned, yet its existence shows how open a platform Reddit can be.

There is perhaps only one appropriate word to categorise Reddit and its users: diverse. No one community defines what Reddit is about, nor should it. Anyone can and should be able to find a subreddit that caters to them, and while there are inherent issues with this, sometimes all we need is a place to feel welcome. There is simply no other website like Reddit.

WORKS CITED

Anderson, Katie Elson. “Ask Me Anything: What Is Reddit?” Library Hi Tech News, vol. 32, no. 5, June 2015, pp. 8–11., doi:10.1108/lhtn-03-2015-0018.

Hutchby, Ian. “Technologies, Texts and Affordances.” Sociology, vol. 35, no. 2, 2001, pp. 441–456. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42856294.

Marwick, Alice E. "The Public Domain: Social Surveillance in Everyday Life."Surveillance & Society, vol. 9, no. 4, 2012, pp. 378-393, ProQuest Central; Sociological Abstracts, https://search-proquest-com.helicon.vuw.ac.nz/docview/1314689547?accountid=14782.

“Reddiquette.” Reddit, Reddit, Inc., www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette.

Schirato, Tony, et al. “Cultural Field and the Habitus.” Understanding Bourdieu, SAGE Publ., 2010, pp. 21–44.