Here are some thought on a possible ethnography of Reddit. Some of these questions do not only relate to the specific case of Reddit but could also be asked more generally for other online ethnographies.
The idea of reddit is simple: Users (Redditors) can link to stuff they find on the web and share it with other redditors or simply write something and submit it . Others can give that post ‘up’ or ‘down’ votes, depending on whether they like it or not. Users can also comment the post and reply to comments already posted. This basic concept doesn’t differ a lot from social networking sites like Facebook or internet forums. But there are some distinct features that make reddit stand out. First, the infrastructure allows for an open communication with all users (you don’t have be ‘friends’ with someone and in most cases you don’t have to be a formal member of the specific group to interact with them). Second, the up and down votes create lists of posts that are especially popular in the community. A very popular post raises to the top and will be highly visible for most of the users on the home page (front page). The Front Page itself is a selection of the most popular ‘subreddit’, which is probably the most distinct feature on reddit. A ‘subreddit’ is like a subtopic in a forum and there are hundreds of thousands of them. If you chose to post on reddit you would first have to decide which of these thematic sub forums to submit your post to. The subreddits are very diverse and defined by various characteristics like hobbies (r/music r/gaming’) or by the type of media submitted (like videos in r/videos) or they can be designed to support and help others (r/personalfinance).
Some thought on how to approach fieldwork on reddit.com:
Generally, any active subreddit could be the subject of an ethnography. However, the bigger subreddits like AskReddit where users ask very general questions about virtually anything would be more difficult to overview due to its high popularity and trying to argue for a single shared culture to exist in this space would be rather difficult. A very interesting but also highly problematic subreddit would be ‘circle jerk’. In this subreddit redditors make fun of the stereotypical viewpoints and phrases of redditors and especially the fact that a lot of discussions on reddit could be described as ‘preaching to the choir’ and the same views are repeated over and over again by like-minded individuals. The fact that redditors in this subreddit interact exclusively in a satirical manner makes serious ethnographic work (like interviews) in this subreddit very difficult.
Although research questions are more likely to emerge after the first weeks or months of observing and participating in the community (or more precisely: for these questions to emerge the initial phase of observation is indispensable) there are nonetheless some interesting aspects one could focus on from the beginning:
Rules. For example, one could look at the underlying rules of the subreddit. What type of posts are allowed? What behavior is encouraged by the mods? In most subreddits these rules can be found in the sidebar but there are probably more rules that are not necessarily written out but become evident after spending some time on the subreddit.
Interaction. One should also focus on the different types of interaction: Replying, gifting gold, private messaging, up voting, down voting. When do users of the selected user group reach out to private messaging? What makes them up or down vote a post or give reddit gold?
Shared knowledge. An integral part of being a redditor is knowing the memes that are being used. It’s important to look out for words, phrases or shared memories and the way they are being used and activated in discussions and the way they contribute to the forming of the community.
A potential problem: The Internet & Place.
In what way should Redditors offline lives be included in such an ethnography? Should participant observation extend to these offline worlds or stay in the limits of the online community? To what extend can we ignore offline ‘worlds’ and still have a representative image of these Redditors?
Some good examples: In his ethnography ‘The Internet: an ethnographic approach’ about Trinidadians and their use of the internet, Daniel Miller and Don Slater integrate the on-line and the off-line worlds. In fact, this entire ethnography is based on previous ethnographic work in Trinidad that focused solely on the off-line world. What’s more, Miller and Slater argue against the notion of a placeless ‘cyberspace’ and suggest that to understand what the internet is as a whole in this specific ethnography you have to consider what ‘being Trini’ means (Miller & Slater 2000: 1). On the contrary, in ‘Coming of Age in Second Life’ Boellstorff (2008) studies ‘virtual worlds only ‘in their own term” because ‘the vast majority [of participants] interact only in the virtual world’. Nevertheless, Boellstorff understands that these virtual lives have a great impact on the social life in the offline world.
More thoughts to follow.