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).”

“Reddit is a widely used social media platform organized into specialized communities, known as subreddits, each focused on specific topics (Proferes et al. 2021).”

“%) of these publications using Reddit are part of the Computer Science, Engineering, and Math field [33].”

“Subreddits have been used extensively to investigate various healthcare topics (Proferes et al., 2021), including the experiences of people who are considering or have a CIED (Nicmanis et al., 2023, 2025b).”

“…my findings and a version of this article with the community for feedback before submission and obtained multiple rounds of informed community consent throughout the study (Fiesler et al., 2024; Proferes et al., 2021), including during article revisions to address reviewer feedback and concerns.”

“…17–21 , Against this background, this study explores opinions about the APA’s principle and ethics of commentary on an individual’s mental health, as articulated on the social media platform, Reddit; previously, this site has served as a valuable information source for medical investigations [24].”

“As such, formal ethics approval was not required for this study (Proferes et al., 2021), though ethical consideration and consultation were undertaken.”

“Due to the array of important research questions that can be investigated, scholars across disciplines and the globe have become more familiar with using Reddit as a data source (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“Each subreddit sets perimeters around acceptable forms of engagement through rules, culture, and moderation practices (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“These features increase accessibility and ease of self-disclosure, but they also raise validity concerns, including account transience and the use of throwaway accounts that make authenticity difficult to assess [14,85].”

“Also, the posts on Reddit are algorithmically sorted by user participation, including the symbolic gestures of upvotes and downvotes (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“This approach protects user anonymity and avoids exposing posts to a level of publicity beyond what users could reasonably expect 17 .”

“We focus on Reddit to study real-time and long-form expressions in common-interest communities (Proferes et al. 2021).”

“With its large user base, topical structure, and accessible data, Reddit has become an important site for qualitative research across multiple fields (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“…al., 2011; Wang & Inbar, 2021); analyzing posts on social media sites, such as Instagram and Twitter/X (Blake et al., 2018; Brady et al., 2017; Brooks et al., 2022; Kern et al., 2016), and online forums, such as Reddit (Proferes et al., 2021); or examining Wikipedia entries (Baumard et al., 2022).”

“Research utilising Reddit has recently gained prominence across several disciplines, amongst which medicine and health are well represented (Proferes et al., 2021) The second, Mayo Clinic Connect ‘ Post-COVID Recovery & COVID-19 Support Group ’ was chosen due to its specific focus and also had…”

“Additionally, Proferes et al. (2021) a concentration of research and data utilisation on Reddit, with many analysis, including machine learning, natural language processing, and topic modelling.”

“Given the design of Reddit and similar social media platforms, comments that received more upvotes are more likely to be seen by other users (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“…than direct interaction with human subjects (human-oriented research), the project was formally deemed exempt from Institutional Review Board (IRB) or Ethical Review Board (ERB) oversight, following common regulatory interpretations regarding public data (Gliniecka 2023; Proferes et al. 2021).”

“While communities on Reddit have been widely studied in the CSCW literature [76], the ethical infrastructure and rhetorical focus of our analysis may provide new insights into how subreddits can be meaningfully structured to encourage discussions of values and ethics in relation to technology…”

“Over the past decade, there has been a significant increase in studies using Reddit data with more and more researchers turning towards the platform to gather freely-expressed user opinions [16].”

“27 However, the datasets extracted by two researchers from the same platform can differ significantly.”

“These platforms were selected for their high user activity in Malaysia, pseudonymous participation enabling free expression on sensitive issues (Proferes et al., 2021), and prevalent LGBTQ +-related discussions ensuring a rich source of naturally occurring linguistic data.”

“In addition, like other social media sites such as Twitter [7], [8] and Reddit [9], [10], SO has also attracted many researchers to investigate the sentiments that occur in discussions between software developers.”

“Real-world online discourse is thematically diverse (Song et al. 2023); for instance, entertainment drives 70% of traffic on Weibo (China Marketing Corp 2024), while Reddit’s largest communities focus on gaming and technology (Proferes et al. 2021).”

“The platform was very accessible, which allowed the researcher to set up the required libraries and scraping tools to collect the relevant data for the study [17], [18], [19].”

“Although the site has been criticised for its relaxed moderation policies, its tolerance of anonymous accounts, and its linkage to controversial incidents (Proferes et al., 2021), it has become a venue for fan discussion to fl ourish.”

“Among these platforms, Reddit has emerged as a particularly valuable resource, hosting 52 million daily active users and over 138,000 community topics or “subreddits” [10].”

“Theproliferationofuser-generated content on Twitter and Reddit, ranging from product reviews to political discourse, illustrates the growing influence of online opinions [21].”

“Proferes et al. (2021) note that ‘Reddit’s user base trends toward particular demographics’ (p. 12), such as that ‘it is majority male and skews young’ (p. 10), and this should be taken into account when interpreting these results. in addition, the demographics cannot be ascertained from the data…”

“Social media documents, on the other hand, have a large public availability, but there is little control over the data that is collected and the contextual aim of the document, usually requiring some assumptions (e.g., self-reported diagnoses) [70].”

“Understanding the dynamics of user interactions within these platforms is important for various applications, including understanding user behavior [2], [3], community management [4], [5], content recommendation [6], [7] etc.”

“Reddit, a popular social media platform in the United States, counts nearly 40% of people 18–29 years of age as users, and functions as an interactive online bulletin board [10, 11].”

“We take care to consider ethical aspects of using the collected data (Proferes et al. 2021).”

“PII was deleted to ensure ethical social media practice [21], Norman et al. [2], and Hintz et al. [3].”

“Even studies that synthesise how Reddit is used as a research site largely describe one platform at a time rather than comparing textual outcomes across infrastructures (Proferes et al., 2021).”

“Understanding the dynamics of user interactions within these platforms is important for various applications, including understanding user behavior [2], [3], community management [4], [5], content recommendation [6], [7] etc.”

“…field, the human-computer interaction field has an extensive history of considering the morality of studying data that people might have technically made public but that they might not wish to be used in research or that might cause harms if quoted in a publication, e.g., [12,31,34,70,77,107].”