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The involvement of individuals with disabilities in online discussions related to disability and accessibility is a critical area of study. While previous research has qualitatively examined the participation of individuals with disabilities on social media platforms, large-scale analysis of social media content by people with disabilities has been an underexplored area. This paper presents a pioneering large-scale study of disability communities on Reddit. We developed an anonymized text-based dataset that consists of 1.5 million comments posted on three subreddits: r/disability, r/Blind, and r/ADHD. Using topic modeling, we analyzed the dataset and identified eight highly-coherent common categories and their associated keywords across the three subreddits. We contribute an Anonymized Disability Discourse Reddit Corpus (ADDReC) of 1.5 million comments that feature eight disability discourse categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fear of crime is an emotional response individuals have toward crime or the anticipation related to being the victim of crime. The increasing exposure to crime information presents considerable risks to people's psychological health and well‐being. Nevertheless, the fear of crime in online discourses is under‐researched despite abundant conversations about crime. This work presents a mixed‐methods study to comprehend how people disclose the fear of crime and what linguistic content or cues are associated with the fear. We gathered conversations about crime in the Baltimore subreddit. The content analysis revealed a necessity to differentiate between "experienced" and "expressive" fear of crime. The regression modeling identified strong factors related to the fear of crime, such as negative sentiment, objective expression, and first‐person pronouns. This work extends the conceptualization of the fear of crime in online discourses and suggests potential ways to detect the fear automatically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Toxicity has increased on social networking sites (SNSs), sparking a debate on its underlying causes. While research readily explored eligible social factors, disorder induced by the very nature of SNSs has been neglected so far. The relationship between disorder and deviant behaviors could be revealed within the offline sphere. Incorporating the theoretical lens of the Broken Windows Theory, we propose that a similar mechanism is prevalent in the online context. To test the hypothesis that perceived disorder increases toxicity on SNSs, the study compares two subcommunities on Reddit dedicated to the same topic that differ in their perceived disorder. Sampling the toxicity scores via data collection and natural language processing yields the first evidence for our hypothesis. We further outline subsequent studies that aim to investigate further the phenomenon of how disorder-related factors contribute to toxic online environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social networking sites and online communities are used by billions of people globally. It is important to understand the participation in these collaborative platforms and the roles different participants play. In this study, we examine the roles both local and global opinion leaders play and their influence on the community using content related to Covid mental health from Reddit. We employed social network analysis to identify opinion leaders based on their network position and connections, and we used sentiment analysis and econometric models to examine their impact on online health community participation. Our study reveals that global opinion leaders have more influence on thread participation than local opinion leaders. In addition, negative emotions expressed encourage more participants’ involvement in online health community discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work and learning are essential facets of our existence, yet socio‐cultural barriers may limit access and opportunity in such contexts. Women historically have faced several restrictions that have hindered their entry into professional ventures. Such constraints also manifest in technical domains, due to the sociocultural barriers in these fields which have placed such voices at the margins. These barriers have been associated with strife, turmoil, and emotional strain for those affected. Hence, it is important to investigate how women can subvert such structural limitations and can find channels through which they can seek support and guidance to navigate their careers. Motivated by this aim, this work through mixed inferences drawn from content and emotion analysis of 1,062 conversational threads embarks on a preliminary investigation of a subreddit (r/girlsgonewired) to understand the ways in which community practices may emerge in such channels to provide various dimensions of support and resilience‐building to help manage the struggles and travails of everyday life. The long‐term goal for this work is to address the way in which such channels can be designed, maintained, and curated to offer spaces for enrichment, empowerment, and advocacy with a focus on professional development for women in technical domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the effect of established social media on stock markets has been thoroughly investigated, the recent surge in retail investing and the emergence of different finance-related Reddit communities with unique new traits have led to new research questions. In this work, we aim to understand the linguistic and thematic characteristics and differences of the largest financial Reddit communities, r/WallStreetBets, r/stocks, and r/investing. Using different techniques for the analysis of linguistic features and topic modeling, we identify keywords and phrases that are most prominent in each community and determine each community’s thematic focus and risk affinity. An analysis of users that post on all of these communities confirm these findings, as they appear to adapt to the respective target audience when posting. The stock returns for each community prove consistent with their respective risk profile. Overall, we conclude that understanding these communities can help investors in making more informed investment decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether and what kind of social support exchange in Professional-only Online Health Communities (POHC). Focusing on the recent fast-growing outbreak—Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)— we find that healthcare professionals benefit from peer social support in POHCs, particularly by exchanging emotional support and learning from collective experience-based knowledge. Using the Reddit/r/medicine data, we show that posts’ popularity varies depending on the authors’ emotions and informativeness. In particular, a post’s negative emotion and narrative tone have a significant and positive association with the post’s popularity. These findings speak to the important role of POHC associated with healthcare professionals’ integrity during the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highly engaged online communities can be characterized in terms of level of user activity and the valence of those activities. Positively‐valenced communities engage in co‐construction through supportive, uplifting interactions, while negatively‐valenced communities engage in co‐destruction through shared animosity towards outside individuals and groups. Both types of engagement offer prosocial benefits to community members, but this benefit is achieved through antisocial means in co‐destructive communities. This study examines the features of one positively‐valenced and one negatively‐valenced subreddit community to determine if the same engagement factors drive participation in each, and whether these factors may be influenced to promote positive, rather than negative engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early 2021, the finance world was taken by storm by the dramatic price surge of the GameStop Corp. stock. This rise is being, at least in part, attributed to a group of Redditors belonging to the now-famous r/wallstreetbets (WSB) subreddit group. In this work, we set out to address if user activity on the WSB subreddit is associated with the trading volume of the GME stock. Leveraging a unique dataset containing more than 4.9 million WSB posts and comments, we assert that user activity is associated with the trading volume of the GameStop stock. We further show that posts have a significantly higher predictive power than comments and are especially helpful for predicting unusually high trading volume. Lastly, as recent events have shown, we believe that these findings have implications for retail and institutional investors, trading platforms, and policymakers, as these can have disruptive potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To monitor public opinions on diet, large survey data is commonly used though costly and time consuming. Social media has become a mainstream channel of communication and has drastically grown in popularity, connecting users to a ready stream of health information. While the literature has provided valuable information on the use of social media for health, a broader perspective informed by different types of social media platforms would be highly beneficial. Diet has been extensively explored on a few mainstream platforms, further informing public health research. However, diet conversations on Reddit have only been studied within a narrow scope, looking at specific sub‐communities. This study aims to characterize diet‐related posts and their seasonal patterns using a mixed method approach. We collected more than 500,000 posts with subsequent comments from Reddit over the course of a year. Our findings show that Reddit users across all sub‐communities primarily discussed health promotion, fitness plans, a healthy lifestyle, diet and fitness progress, food experiences, weight loss, as well as vegan and vegetarian diets. In addition, seasonal differences based on the weight of most topics, were found to be significant (p <.05). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term transgender (trans) does not have a singular or fixed meaning; instead, it represents a broad umbrella of identities. Although the term is beneficial in the sense of inclusion, outsider recognition, and social activism, individuals and groups under the trans-umbrella are not without internal ideological differences and deep ambiguities about the boundaries of their membership. Taking a netnographic approach of a trans forum on the popular website Reddit, I offer insights into the complex and intricate membership debates that occur under the trans umbrella. Through this analysis, I present three distinct thresholds for membership: low, medium, and high. Each showcases a mix of social and biological considerations that underlie trans-identity formations, highlighting differences in authenticity claims used within and between the thresholds. My findings show a unique interplay between cultural definitions of trans-identities, lived experiences, and the explicit expulsion of some members in developing and maintaining internal symbolic boundaries of what constitutes a "trans enough" identity. More broadly, I generate new theoretical insights into how membership conflicts can shape political and social activist motivations within trans communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Platforms that depend on user-generated content spend a great deal of effort crafting policies and mechanisms that can yield a steady stream of useful content. In this work, we consider the effects of awards offered by peers, a feature that platforms often provide to enable users to recognize the quality of peers' contributions. We set out to conduct a large-scale field experiment on Reddit, one of the biggest social news aggregation and discussion platforms in the world, evaluating the effect of peer recognition on content generation as well as content novelty. Leveraging the plentiful textual content and its innovative peer recognition mechanism, Gold Award, we purchased and then randomly assigned Gold Award to approximately 900 posts on Reddit, anonymously, over the course of two months. Collecting and analyzing users' behavioral trace data and content postings in the post-treatment period via Reddit's API, our results suggest that the probability of submission increased by 6.6% among treated users, relative to control users, and posts were 95.3% longer on average. Interestingly, however, the content that users post becomes more similar to their awarded content, and thus declines in its novelty. Based on this result, we conclude that peer recognition is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, peer recognition does indeed foster increased engagement and content production among users, but the additional content that results is less novel than content that arrives in the absence of recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online moderation is apropos to community curation as a way to fight against malicious behaviors bristling on User‐Generated Content (UGC)‐based Social Network Sites (SNS). Given the current research gap on voluntary moderation from the perspectives of power misuse, we investigate how power abuse by a moderator would affect the community dynamics in terms of participation indicators, linguistic characteristics, and network structure in a computational fashion. An event on Reddit is chosen for a case study. Using interrupted time‐series analysis and social network analysis, we find moderation fueled short‐term feuds and brought potential prolonged destruction to the community. People's linguistic patterns remained stable while the liberation from "tyranny" brought the community back to life and the power competition entailed negative repulsion. We also find an "Exodus" phenomenon as netizens voted with their feet and migrated to a mirror community when facing severe moderation. This preliminary research expands the connotation of moderation by addressing more forms of power abuse. We also refer to social movement and community choice theories in relevant fields and provide the insights of online moderation from interdisciplinary perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These studies examine the influence of group size and the passage of time on two characteristics of online communities: dispersion of participation in group discussions and active member turnover from month to month. We used multilevel analysis to examine the dynamics of user contributions to discussions on Reddit, a popular website that hosts large group discussions, across 30 groups over six years. Group size is positively related to concentration of participation among fewer members, an effect that is partially mitigated by the passage of time. As time passes, groups fail to retain as many actively contributing members from month to month, an effect that is partially mitigated by group size. The effect of time on active member retention appears to be comprised of both a maturation effect (as each group ages, turnover increases) as well as a cohort effect (groups formed later have higher turnover than groups formed earlier). We can conclude from these results that both the passage of time and increased group size make online groups less community-like, but in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is axiomatic that a functional public sphere depends on quality information, and the traditional source of that information has been legacy news media, most particularly major metro newspapers. The ongoing contraction of the legacy media has led to concerns for the public sphere. Some theorists have placed hope in citizen journalism, including a kind of citizen journalism that takes place on social news sharing sites, as potentially filling some gaps left by shrinking public affairs journalism. However, little research has been done to investigate what citizens use as sources of information in discursive comment threads on social news sites. In this case study, I conduct a content analysis of links posted in discussions of local public affairs on Seattle's subreddit r/Seattle to see what information from Seattle's information ecology discussants are citing and re-posting. Findings show that Seattle Reddit users rely far more on alternative media sources and non-mediated sources, especially government sources, than they do on legacy media, but legacy media is still important in setting the conversation agenda. But Reddit users do not reproduce professional standards of journalism, and establish a limited conversation agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a large and growing body of work on IS security, few studies focus on the real behavior of hackers. What research currently exists has predominantly used decision theory, game theory, and/ or surrogates to simulate the behavior of hackers. This paper will examine interactions between members of online hacker communities, through a lens of Social Influence Theory, in an effort to determine: 1) what values do members of online hacker communities express? and 2) to what extent those values affect members' levels of participation in the online community? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussing sexual health issues (e.g., erectile dysfunction and STDs) may be more stigmatized than other types of health issues. This might be especially true for men as such issues may be perceived as physical weaknesses. Online support communities (OSC) may provide men a comfortable environment where they can discuss and seek help about such intimate issues. Guided by social exchange theory, we propose a cost-benefit framework that could capture the mechanism of sexual health information disclosure in OSC. We examine men's subjective evaluation of costs (privacy concerns and social disapproval) and benefits (online social support and reciprocity) associated with disclosing sexual health issues. Additionally, we examine how technological affordances (text-based communication and anonymity) influence this costbenefit analysis. We hope to advance the understanding on men's online self-disclosure behavior as well as influential factors that predict disclosure of sexual health issues in OSC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TrollXChromosomes is a women-focused humor subreddit on the community site Reddit.com. This article presents the findings of a descriptive content analysis of TrollX's top-ranked postings. Three themes emerge: that TrollX is a space for networked affective content, that postings often concern women's embodiment and sexuality, and that they suggest feminist perspectives. These themes are all linked by the image of the troll, a remixed, reclaimed version of the negative, antisocial identity that disrupts and often harasses communities. The TrollX troll revels in the absurdities of daily life, celebrates women's experiences, and pushes against patriarchal notions of women's pleasures. This work explores how TrollX manages to exist and thrive on Reddit, which is commonly known for its toxicity around issues of gender and race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article advances efforts to theorize the redoing and undoing of gender by proposing that nonbinary transgender experiences constitute a subset of "doing transgender" (Connell 2010). Through discourse analysis of discussion threads and content analysis of selfies posted to the genderqueer community on the social media site Reddit, this virtual ethnography highlights some mechanisms through which genderqueer individuals do, redo, and undo gender. This article concludes optimistically, by discussing some institutional shifts that these efforts to redo and undo gender have effected. It appears that individuals can successfully "do genderqueer" when interacting with those who acknowledge gender diversity beyond the binary model, even if this ideological shift remains field-contingent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social work professions are increasingly studied as key sites for understanding precarity, affective labor, and the future of care work. However, little research has explored social workers' recordkeeping practices. This study expands on existing research on records and documentation through engaging with users of "R/Socialwork," a subforum on the internet forum Reddit.com. Utilizing a multimodal approach drawing on participant observation, in‐depth interviewing, and discourse analysis, this research sought to answer the following research question: How do social workers understand their use of and interaction with records? Findings indicated widespread frustration with documentation paradigms in the profession, with variation based on sub‐field and proximity to clinical practice. Users expressed this frustration in a variety of ways, with some utilizing the forum to support entrepreneurial approaches to problems in the field, while others used the site as an alternative form of recordkeeping, documenting their emotional responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]