Studying Reddit: A Systematic Overview of Disciplines, Approaches, Methods, and Ethics

“Studies such as these suggest that researchers may need to consider the generalizability and representativeness of models built using Reddit data, particularly in the context of ongoing conversations regarding language modeling (see Bender et al., 2021).”

“The Pushshift dataset contains submissions and comments posted on Reddit since June 2005, and has been popular for researchers due to its ease of use and larger querying limits (Baumgartner et al., 2020).”

“Tufekci (2014) once called Twitter the “model organism” for academic study because tweets are considered to be “public,” because Twitter has open APIs which fosters easy data collection, and because Twitter users often respond to world events as they unfold, making it a useful location to gather…”

“For example, personally identifiable information from more than 87 million Facebook users was collected in an academic study, but then the data were used by Cambridge Analytica to micro-target political advertisements (Isaak & Hanna, 2018).”

“Moreover, the smaller the community being studied in any context, the more difficult it is to maintain the anonymity of research subjects (Saunders et al., 2015), even without the additional complication of direct quotes being discoverable by search engines (Bruckman, 2002; Markham, 2012).”

“Additionally, the pseudonymous nature of Reddit participation makes it challenging to accurately assess demographic information, as users are not required to disclose personal details such as age or gender, limiting the ability to contextualise findings across different demographic groups [21].”

“Reddit serves as a widely accessible, large platform with distinct topic-specific discussion areas, known as subreddits [1].”

“Reddit is a social media framework that has 52 million daily active users and over 430 million monthly active users, ranking it as the sixth most popular social media website in the United States [20], [21].”

“Proferes et al [22] conducted a systematic analysis of 727 manuscripts that used Reddit as a data source and found that fewer than 15% mentioned undergoing any form of ethical review.”

“Considering the prevalence of abuse among patients with breast cancer [20] and that many seek support in online forums such as Reddit [39], it could be useful to raise awareness of safety planning within r/breastcancer as a health promotion strategy.”

“(Gilbert, 2018, pp. 175, 178, 204; Massanari, 2017; Proferes et al., 2021, pp. 2, 10).”

“Furthermore, following emerging best practices in taking a human-centered approach to large-scale analysis of social media, all quotes from Reddit have been lightly paraphrased for readability and to reduce searchability while maintaining semantic fidelity to the original post [73].”

“Reddit is a high-engagement, open-access platform with more than 100 , 000 topic-specific subreddits and approximately 50 million daily active users [7, 8, 20, 27, 29, 42], enabling peer-driven, real-time discussions that reflect collective sentiment and information exchange [19, 30, 36, 37, 47].”

“Many researchers argue that users in forums in which posts are openly and publicly accessible have no expectation of privacy, and that therefore this can be considered public data not subject to the same GDPR requirements [46].”

“The potential benefits of this research include amplifying the voices of autistic individuals and contributing to better-informed support strategies for autistic burnout (Nicmanis et al., 2024; Proferes et al., 2021).”

“A recent review found that 727 manuscripts used Reddit as a data source between 2010 and 2020, with the authors recommending caution related to use of data from vulnerable populations and the generalizability of data (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“In summary, according to Proferes et al. [62], many relevant studies focus on politics and mental health while the commonly utilized methodologies are often relative to computational and statistical procedures.”

“Within the array of social media platforms, Reddit is an online forum that has emerged as one of the leading social platforms, with 52 million daily users and over 430 million active users [26].”

“The anonymous nature of this platform fosters an environment in which users can discuss and interact with one another freely [18].”

“…of topics and can vary in membership from single figures to the tens of millions, and each has their own members’ rules and moderation practices (Proferes et al., 2021). r/askgaybros is a subreddit with a membership of 371,000, as of June 2023 at the time of writing, and was created in November…”

“Data are openly available for researchers, making Reddit an increasingly popular source of data for both qualitative and computational social science research (Medvedev et al., 2019; Proferes et al., 2021).”

“Finally, the con fl uence of pseudonymity and throwaway accounts (created to make few posts) may impact users ’ behavior on Reddit (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“Proferes XSL • FO RenderX et al [28] asked whether Reddit data only provides insight into phenomena specific to the characteristics of the website.”

“This approach considers the subreddit community context as an environment with its own norms and culture (cf. Proferes et al., 2021) and allows for the comparison of ON conceptualizations in the context of eating pathologies versus dietary lifestyle choices.”

“While public profiles— of individuals and organizations— offer an open gateway to the data, it doesn’t mean there aren’t any risks associated with its use [22].”

“Identifying personal accounts in such contexts may be especially harmful to individuals (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“Reddit administrators are much less tolerant of hateful content than they have been in the past, meaning I had to change my PhD research plans on multiple occasions.”

“In platforms like fanfiction forums or Reddit, writing is often part of reciprocal exchange—commenting, mentoring, remixing.”

“As our research objectives and interests require the trust of the Mastodon administrator community, we follow Proferes et al. [75]’s best practices for online data collection of public data that ordinarily would be considered exempted by IRBs.”

“To further safeguard the privacy of Reddit users, we sampled posts from a wide range of subreddits to mitigate the ethical risks associated with exposing specific sub-communities or their members (53).”

“Prior research highlights ethical concerns in using social media data—such as risks to privacy, anonymity, and data discoverability [93, 119].”

“…Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved this study as exempt under the “secondary research on data or specimens” category, aligning with the common interpretation that research using public, pseudo-anonymous data is exempt from review, particularly when lacking sensitive information [95].”

“…for engaging participants during the story-writing process, analyzing content posted to third-party websites brings its own set of limitations [80] and ethical considerations (e.g., around “public” data and consent practices [35]), which may further incentivize direct engagement with…”

“For example, not all review boards consider data scraped from the internet (e.g., public social media posts) to be “human-subjects research,” which therefore do not require ethical review (Metcalf & Crawford, 2016; Paxton, 2024; Proferes et al., 2021).”

“It is [43] a social network structured around various topics-focused forums known as ”subreddits,” where users can share experiences, ask questions, and discuss topics anonymously.”

“We lean on the work from Proferes et al. [61] for the specific information to extract from papers.”

“The platforms were selected because they are highly active in Malaysia, allow pseudonymous participation for open discussion on sensitive topics like LGBTQ + issues (Proferes et al., 2021), and have a high prevalence of LGBTQ + -related content, ensuring a rich source of relevant linguistic data.”

“Particularly, Reddit tends to have a population of commenters who are more likely white and male (Proferes et al., 2021, p. 2).”

“Given the exploratory nature of this study focused on a specific niche topic, the top 100 posts provide valuable insights to guide future research in meaningful directions (16,17) .”

“Individuals are registered under pseudonyms, making the platform particularly well-suited for researching sensitive topics, as the expectation of anonymity may increase trustworthiness and authentic reporting (Schrading et al., 2015; Proferes et al., 2021).”

“While there is signiicantly less research on Reddit than on Twitter (renamed to łXž in 2023) 1 , the academic community has been gaining interest in extracting information and patterns from Reddit due to its rich variety of interesting communities [35].”

“The annotations were carried out utilizing OpenAI’s API with the model version gpt-4-0125-preview.”

“Thus, while the functionality remains the same, each subreddit operate with ‘ their own individual norms and cultures, as well as moderation practices, meaning insights from social phenomena in one subreddit may not translate across contexts ’ (Proferes et al., 2021: 1).”

“…as a platform for research and the popularity of data collection modalities that likely entail mediation via these inbuilt sorting algorithms [17]; these different sorting algorithms mediate both the interactions of users and academics with reddit’s communities in ways that are in need of…”

“In addition to solely using public data, the author of this paper followed the recommendations from Proferes et al. (2021), to the effect that displaying usernames and direct quotes in articles should be avoided to protect privacy.”

“However, in a systematic analysis of 727 manuscripts that used Reddit as a data source, only 15% mentioned any form of ethical review [20].”

“…disciplines have developed interest in studying conversations on Reddit for research on mental health issues, political issues, and social support (Miller, 2020; Park and Conway, 2018; Soliman et al., 2019), and more recently there is research on using Reddit for research (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“Prior work has used Reddit extensively for user studies related to computer science [38], and even cybersecurity and cryp-tocurrencies specifically [7,19].”

“Several tools have already been developed for collecting Reddit data (Proferes et al., 2021); however, their use has become increasingly restricted and costly due to recent changes to Reddit’s API access policies (Wright, 2024).”

“We follow established guidance for research using online data (Fiesler and Pro-feres 2018; Proferes et al. 2021; Bruckman 2002).”

“Reddit offers a useful setting for such a research question (Proferes et al. 2021).”

“It provides various groups known as subred-dits where users can ask for recommendations and guidance on broad topics [7].”

“Subsequently, we develop a new measure of relative engagement (MRE) to enhance our understanding of multi-community membership in a digital era by assessing differences in user posting across different communities and show how it can be used alongside existing measures (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“The rise of social media for health-related discourse (Chen & Wang, 2021) gives researchers access to fi rsthand accounts and peer-to-peer interactions (McKenna et al., 2017; Proferes et al., 2021).”

“Reddit, with over 108 million daily active users (Redditinc.com, 2025), is a leading platform in discussions of controversial and emotionally charged events, particularly in political and business contexts (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“Reviews of published social media research papers found few mentioned ethical considerations and those that did simply noted their “exempt” status, even in studies processing potentially sensitive information [50, 109].”

“Reddit is a discussion-based platform where users share thoughts, experiences, and inquiries within topical communities or ‘subreddits’ (Proferes et al 2021, Norman Adams 2022).”

“Although the data are publicly available and anonymized, we para-phrased quotes to protect the privacy of individuals posting in Reddit forums and to avoid discouraging others from engaging in this form of discourse (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“These subreddits are user-generated and moderated by volunteer users, therefore communities vary considerably by their rules and cultures (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“As Reddit is user-created and user-moderated, subreddits vary significantly in terms of what they allow (Proferes et al., 2021), which can enable unfiltered, antagonistic and polarized discussions.”

“42 There were 5 stages involved in corpus creation which are briefly described here.”

“The approaches to address these ethical challenges are highly variable and best practices continue to be debated [42, 99].”

“Reddit’s terms of use state the possible research purpose of the publicly available data [66], which fulfills the legal requirement of using its data [73].”

“…receive more respective replies than non-SD posts, while ”-” indicates that non-SD posts receive more respective replies than SD posts. vious work (Proferes et al. 2021) suggesting that subreddits have their own norms, cultures, and moderation practices, so that insights in one subreddit may not…”

“Nevertheless, the sample size is comparable to prior research using online forums, such as privacy-related advice [56, 60].”

“This corpus consists of 2,073 sustainability discussions from between 2017 and 2022 on the Reddit.com sub-communities (Proferes et al., 2021) called europe , europeanunion , and europes , with 46,285 comments.”

“These sub-reddits have become desirable places for people to share health-related information, particularly concerning the management of chronic diseases and heart conditions (Foufi et al., 2019; Nicmanis et al., 2023; Proferes et al., 2021).”

“The research community is divided on how one should approach data exploitation in online communities (Proferes et al., 2021) and how one should recruit in potentially marginalised and vulnerable online communities (Littler & Joy, 2021).”

“In particular, we followed the guidelines suggested by Proferes et al. (2021) including protection of individual privacy and pseud-onymity by not quoting members of the community, keeping our analysis at a group level, removing deleted posts from the dataset, and not sharing or publicly archiving…”