Evolution of reddit: from the front page of the internet to a self-referential community?
Abstract
In the past few years, Reddit -- a community-driven platform for submitting, commenting and rating links and text posts -- has grown exponentially, from a small community of users into one of the largest online communities on the Web. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the most comprehensive longitudinal study of Reddit's evolution to date, studying both (i) how user submissions have evolved over time and (ii) how the community's allocation of attention and its perception of submissions have changed over 5 years based on an analysis of almost 60 million submissions. Our work reveals an ever-increasing diversification of topics accompanied by a simultaneous concentration towards a few selected domains both in terms of posted submissions as well as perception and attention. By and large, our investigations suggest that Reddit has transformed itself from a dedicated gateway to the Web to an increasingly self-referential community that focuses on and reinforces its own user-generated image- and textual content over external sources.
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Reddit users are not representative of the US population and have strong socio-demographic biases.
“Reddit users are not representative of the US population, and instead have strong socio-demographic biases.”
From No echo in the chambers of political interactions on Reddit (2021) · cites this paper as [46]
The political leaning and general interests of Reddit users may differ from those of the general population.
“it has been shown that the political leaning and general interests of Reddit users may differ from those of the general population46.”
From No echo in the chambers of political interactions on Reddit (2021) · cites this paper as [46]
Cites
An exploration of discussion threads in social news sites: a case study of the Reddit community
Weninger, T., Zhu, X. A., & Han, J. (2013) · Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining · doi:10.1145/2492517.2492646 · Cited by 110 · see citing works
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No echo in the chambers of political interactions on Reddit
De Francisci Morales, G., Monti, C., & Starnini, M. (2021) · Scientific Reports · doi:10.1038/s41598-021-81531-x · Cited by 98 · see citing works
“More importantly, it has been shown that the political leaning and general interests of Reddit users may differ from those of the general population [46].”
Background
- Authors
- Singer, P., Flöck, F., Meinhart, C., Zeitfogel, E., & Strohmaier, M.
- Affiliations
- Graz University of Technology (AT)
- Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (DE)
- Universität Koblenz (DE)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2014-04-07
- Pages
- 517-522
- OpenAlex
- W4298502720
- Cited by
- 117
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 10 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 10 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 11 · 2019: 11 · 2018: 13 · 2017: 9 · 2016: 8 · 2015: 7
- FWCI
- 7.36
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- International World Wide Web Conference (WWW) (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Microsoft
- Microsoft Research
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Northwestern University
- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
- Arizona State University
- University of Pittsburgh
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Pennsylvania State University
- TU Graz, Internationale Beziehungen und Mobilitätsprogramme
- Indian National Science Academy
- University of Patras
- Northumbria University
- Politecnico di Torino
- Institute for Scientific Interchange
- Skoll Foundation
- University of Southampton
- University of St Andrews
- King's College London
- University College London
- University of Oxford
- University of Glasgow
- Queen's University Belfast
- Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
- Australian National University
- National University of Singapore
- European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics
- École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
- Hong Kong Baptist University
- Queensland University of Technology
- Technische Universiteit Delft
- Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
- University of Twente
- Hanyang University
- Seoul National University
- Korea University
- Sungkyunkwan University
- Dalian University of Technology
- Queen's University
- Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
- Indian Institute of Technology Madras
- Tsinghua University
- Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi
- Stockholms Läns Landsting
- Universiteit Gent
- University of Waterloo
- University of Tokyo
- Chinese University of Hong Kong
- Aston University
- Universitair Medisch Centrum Groningen
- Universidad de Chile
- Université de Fribourg
- Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
- Barcelona Supercomputing Center
- University of Tsukuba
- Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
- Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia para Engenharia de Software
- Institut National des Sciences Appliquées Rouen
- Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
- Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
- Universidade de Pernambuco
- Universität Kassel
- Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
- Région Normandie
- International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad
- Samsung
- University of California, Santa Barbara
- Leibniz-Gemeinschaft
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Statistical and Nonlinear Physics › Complex Network Analysis Techniques
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Media and Digital Communication
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Keywords
- Reddit, online communities, user-generated content, attention allocation, community evolution, longitudinal analysis, content rating
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