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).”

“R EDDIT is the largest, public, topically-separated forum [1].”

“Furthermore, subreddits have their own norms and moderation cultures, potentially limiting the results’ generalizability (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“Scholarship increasingly uses reddit as a data source for research, and this project uses [18] as the starting point for how analysis of the selected subreddit is framed and conducted ethically.”

“Following a recent analysis of Reddit-based research [10], our updated analysis can delve deeper into the growth in the use of Twitter as a data source, focusing on the particular topics and communities”

“However, Reddit is believed to skew toward younger, male users, who may be more concerned with sustainability in fashion than the general population (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“A commonly used platform is Reddit, a social media service combined of “subreddits,” topical communities where anonymous users discuss specific areas of interest [20].”

“Techniques here might include ad-hoc ethnographic observations and entail manual data collection “(i.e., screengrabs, copy/pasting)” [96].”

“At the same time, an analysis by Proferes et al. (2021) of all peer-reviewed Reddit scholarship between 2010 and 2020 found only two studies using Reddit data under the topic heading “ sports and games.”

“…and while we attempted to include a diverse population and diverse collection of self-disclosures, the demographics of Reddit skew toward younger male and western individuals, and other demographics, ages, and genders, are under-represented (Proferes et al., 2021; Pew Research Center, 2016).”

“The platform’s topic-specific communities (subreddits), moderated by peers facing similar challenges [74, 134, 146] and governed by community-specific rules [65], enable active support spaces [132].”

“These concerns are extensively studied by the research community as reported in e.g., Proferes et al. [35].”

“3 Similarly, Reddit’s site-wide user agreement is somewhat ambiguous on the issue of data collection outside of using their official API, ‘which is free and publicly available’ (Proferes et al., 2021, p. 3).”

“These subreddits allow for specific and moderated forums, making them a robust data source for analyzing language and topics across various issues [21, 26].”

“Reddit users are predominantly white young adults based in the United States [30].”

“Reddit and Stack Exchange (including Stack Overflow) are two commonly-used sources of data for academic research [65,34].”

“2019, Proferes et al .”

“Most discussions on Reddit are accessible to the public, in that anyone can view the content regardless of whether they have a Reddit account, except for those in private subreddits (Proferes et al. 2021).”

“Further, because Reddit users may be more likely to be younger White males (Duggan and Smith, 2013; Proferes et al., 2021), the results of this study may not be generalizable across demographics, particularly underrepresented racial and ethnic groups among whom opioid misuse and overdose risk has…”

“Data collections for research through Reddit are increasing [32], while usability and validity have been demonstrated [33].”

“Despite being widely used in quantitative approaches, few studies seem to have used qualitative or mixed-method approaches [30,35,53].”

“In addition to being ethically compliant, I have made further ethical considerations as an ethnographer should (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“We maintained the name of the subreddit that the data were obtained from given its visibility as an abortion community on Reddit and its relatively high number of members, offering some level of shielding for individual users [69].”

“…as a secondary analysis of publicly available data, is eligible for self-exemption under our Institutional Review Board (IRB) guidelines, 4 we recognized that IRB guidelines may not always suffice for community safety, and the publicness of Reddit data might obscure complex ethical issues [33, 75].”

“It encourages users to share personal experiences on stigmatized topics [4,37].”

“This abundance of publicly available data makes Reddit a popular resource for many academic research [24, 30].”

“To the author’s understanding, Reddit’s Application Programming Interface (API) is freely available and can be used to access content posted by Reddit users (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“Second, though the Pushshift API is a widely used resource [31,60,61], it has some limitations [38], including in relation to missing data (eg, missing data for the r/leaves subreddit in the year 2013) because of the nature of the archival process; however, in analyses on missingness, researchers…”

“Reddit is increasingly becoming a reliable data source in computational studies [29].”

“In this study, we choose Reddit since it provides adequate online channels and public settings to discuss specific topics, as well as insights into information seeking and communication among its users (Proferes, Jones, Gilbert, Fiesler, & Zimmer, 2021).”

“%) young males aged 18 to 34, as noted in Proferes et al. [2021].”

“Reddit is a prominent and influential platform that has 430 million monthly active users, with 48% of users being in the US, and over 138,000 communities called subreddits [18,19].”

“…represented in this study; therefore, they may or may not correspond with behaviors in other environments like the workspace (Beninger et al., 2014; Proferes et al., 2021), that is, although some-one may present certain sentiments and opinions online, their behavior in nonvisual spaces may be…”

“Likewise, unlike most social media, the anonymity afforded by Reddit encourages users to discuss and form communities about topics that individuals might shy away from in real life due to fear of personal or professional repercussions [4].”

“Reddit provides a unique source of information, granting insight into lived experiences without external researcher intervention and observation [9-11].”

“First, as the majority of Reddit users are from North America, our data set may not be representative of the global discussion about water pipes during the pandemic [25].”

“Example alternatives include digital ethnography and computational methods like topic modelling [70].”

“In numerous nat-ural language processing studies, Reddit is a frequently used data source [39], [40].”

“…of these features–anonymity-is especially relevant to the platforms of Reddit and Twitter which gives users the freedom to identify as they wish (i.e., no “real-name” policies or suggestions) and more freely express ideals and feelings [76, 77], compared to platforms such as Instagram or Facebook.”

“10 Reddit cannot be thought of as a truly representative sample of the population of ChatGPT users—e.g., prior work has noted that it skews young, male, white, and educated (Proferes et al., 2021; Pew Research Center, 2025).”

“Reddit users skew younger, more technically literate, and more English-speaking than the UK population [32], so our findings may not generalise to the broader public.”

“Reddit stands out from other platforms because it is structured according to topical communities, or “subreddits,” making it a favorite for users sharing thoughts on popular culture (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“Reddit was selected as the primary data source for three reasons: First, Reddit's discussion-oriented structure enables in-depth, topic-focused conversations via subreddits, unlike Twitter/X's brief broadcasts or Instagram's visual focus [14].”

“As one of the world’s most visited websites [116], Reddit is also a popular resource for academic research, particularly in the field of CSCW [31, 32, 49, 57, 70].”

“Yet it is increasingly valued in both qualitative and computational social science (Proferes et al., 2021) such as examining sociability among homeless populations (Bhandari and Sun, 2023), cognitive place associations (Berragan et al., 2024), anti-immigrant discourses (Stravato Emes, 2024), or…”

“However, the use of Reddit as a source for high-quality qualitative data is a well-established practice in the field, supported by prior research that demonstrates its value for analysing player discourse [56, 82].”

“The platform’s popularity has attracted significant interest from scholars who explore Reddit’s public nature and free Application Programming Interface (API) for non-commercial research purposes (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“These qualities make Reddit especially well-suited for examining online community dynamics and discourse across a range of domains [75].”

“While no date and time range for the collection process were specified to allow for a complete historical search of retrievable data, we report the accessible data based on the API norms, policies and query limits (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“…the researchers understand the tensions between public social media accounts and private engagements with this media to be deeply complicated and that further concerns around researchers engaging in unethical AI-driven research intensified such tensions (Proferes et. al, 2021; Galperina, 2025).”

“Its decentralized, user-driven features [23,28] offer researchers a valuable perspective for exploring grassroots conversations surrounding health conditions that carry stigma or emotional burden, such as lung cancer [29,30].”

“Its scale and diversity, combined with features like pseudonymous participation, upvote/downvote mechanisms, and community-specific moderation [9, 12, 22].”

“The ethics of researching illegal online phenomena are still debated (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“Collection and analysis of data from Reddit comes with some ethics concerns, such as described by Proferes et al. [56], or Gliniecka [25].”

“Similar to previous research on other domains [46, 54], we conducted an analysis of user created content on Reddit gaming communities, observing 139 posts (along with top comment) through 27 subreddits, where posters discussed their gaming experiences with or affected by their families.”

“This platform is composed of subreddits, “active topical communities” (Proferes et al., 2021, p. 1), comprising contributors with a common interest or focus.”

“As the research focused solely on analyzing public text-based discourse (without directly engaging human participants), it was exempt from formal ethical review, consistent with current regulatory interpretations [59,60].”

“I identified subreddits based on best practices (Proferes et al., 2021), specifically targeting communities with 50,000 members or more.”

“Such exposure is especially valuable in disciplines like sociology, psychology, and political science, where engaging with diverse perspectives is essential [11, 19].”

“According to Reddit’s site administrators, most users are men aged between 18 and 34 (Amaya et al., 2021; Proferes et al., 2021).”

“This interest is driven not only by its unique community dynamics, but also by a growing need to explore alternatives to traditional platforms like X, TikTok, and Reddit, whose increasingly restrictive access policies have posed significant barriers to researchers (Poudel and Weninger 2024; Pearson et al. 2025; Corso,…”

“Reddit users also may have specific characteristics, interests, or behaviors that are not reflective of a broader population [35].”

“5 Reddit has become a valuable source of information for researchers on various topics, not least for studying political discourses; politics-related communities, such as r/politics or r/worldnews have been widely covered in studies (Proferes et al. 2021, 7).”

“Reddit, as one of “ the most prominent social platforms ” including at least “ 52 million daily active users ” (Proferes et al., 2021: 1), represents an important site of digital community and discourse.”

“Reddit data are subject to reporting and selection bias and Reddit users are skewed toward male and young demographics (Hargittai 2020; Proferes et al. 2021; Reddit Inc 2021).”

“Nonetheless, there is potential value in utilizing internet data in exploratory purposes, particularly in newly recognized phenomena, with hundreds of publications over the past decade utilizing Reddit as its primary data source (Proferes et al. 2021).”

“Platforms like Reddit, which hosts millions of active users and discussions on mental health, provide a unique opportunity to extract insights from user-generated content [6, 7].”

“Furthermore, employing RedditExtractoR for methodology is consistent with Proferes et al. (2021) findings on its effectiveness in gathering detailed conversations within Reddit communities.”

“This surge is attributable to Reddit’s capacity to capture real-time public responses to global events, presenting a dynamic and rich dataset for observation (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“Despite its rich text environment and discussion of mental health, Reddit is underused as a pharmacovigilance data source perhaps because of its diverse topic areas, long character base, and lack of peer reviewed literature (22).”