Digital debating cultures: communicative practices on Reddit

Abstract

Reddit as a platform for online forum interaction hosts various communities (subreddits), which give rise to specific digital communicative practices. Communication on Reddit is on the one hand unified by a set of common affordances, and on the other hand it is characterized by a great deal of variation in terms of topics, interactional patterns, and linguistic features. In this article, we aim to map the communicative space(s) of Reddit by means of vignettes of studies from four research groups, each of them describing a different approach to one or several subreddits. Study 1 examines concessive constructs in r/changemyview posts, Study 2 focuses on expert-lay communication on r/mountaineering, Study 3 addresses register variation within a large corpus of Reddit comments from many different communities, and Study 4 looks across different subreddits to explore the function of text-length. Drawing on these four vignettes, we show the range of discourses that Reddit has hosted in recent years, while also exploring the methodological tools as well as the insights that qualitative, text-based digital humanities, critical discourse analysis and computational text analysis can provide. The map to the Reddit language research space we create here can help digital humanities researchers to make sense of the variety of different theoretical vantage points and methodologies that are currently being employed to Reddit, and it can serve as a guideline when it comes to choosing research agendas and relevant literature on current forum interaction.