Rule 14: Men and Women Are Meant To Get Together

“Rule 14: Men and Women Are Meant To Get

Together”

An ethnographic exploration of Reddit’s gender-related issue publics

Derrek Chundelikatt MA Thesis

Universiteit van Amsterdam Programme: Media Studies (Research)

Supervisor_{​: dhr. dr. Bernhard Rieder} Second reader_{​: mw. Natalia Sánchez-Querubín}

Referencing_{​: MLA 8​}th​ _edition

Index

Abstract 4

1 Introduction 5

1.1 Reddit and its discontents 7

2 Theory: Of Platforms and Communities 11

3 Methodology 17

3.1 Reddit’s issue publics of gender 17

3.1.1 r/TwoXChromosomes 18 3.1.2 r/MensRights 20 3.1.3 r/MensLib 22 3.1.4 r/TheRedPill 23 3.2 Approach 27 3.3 Data 31 3.3.1 Dataset 1: Comprehensive 33 3.3.2 Dataset 2: Manual 33

3.3.3 Dataset 3: Subreddit homepages and archives 34

3.4 Methods 35

3.4.1 Extracting Significant Words 35

3.4.2 Tracing Concepts Across Subreddits 36

3.4.3 Contextualising discourse with word trees 36

3.4.4 Subreddit Referrals 37

3.4.5 Subreddit Similarity 38

3.4.6 Close reading of subreddit homepages 39

4 Data Ethnography of Subreddits 42

4.1 Rules 42

4.2 Significant terms 49

4.2.1 Overall 49

4.2.2 Significant terms over time 51

4.2.3 Significant terms across subreddits 55

4.3 Explicating Organisational Ecologies 61

4.3.1 Subreddit similarity and homepage outlinks 61

4.3.2 Subreddit Referrals 65

5 Conclusions 89

Works Cited 91

Abstract

This research is concerned with ethnographically exploring gender-related issue publics within Reddit, one of the world’s largest social media platforms. Having grown significantly since its inception in 2005, diverse communities have emerged and burgeoned within Reddit. As a result, the space not only offers a diversity of opinion, but also functions as the battleground for the clash of oppositional views. Constructing gender–a hotly debated topic both online and within the field of policy–as a social “controversy” worth examining; this research undertakes the study of four issue publics that form around it––namely r/TwoXChromosomes, r/MensLib, r/MensRights and r/TheRedPill. Facilitating this study is a unique methodological approach, which combines techniques of controversy analysis, literary analysis, ethnographic analysis, and issue mapping with digital methods in order to extract rich textual data from the examined communities and glean informative insights from the accumulated data. Situating these communities within ‘organisational ecologies’, more simply understood as networked clusters within the platform, this paper unveils the relations between these subreddits and the platform as a whole. Additionally, it tracks the vernacular practices distinct to these communities to outline the manner in which they uniquely reappropriate Reddit’s affordances.

1 Introduction

My first encounter with Reddit occurred during my search for a suitable forum to discuss current affairs in the world of football and my affection for Manchester United––the club I supported growing up. The self-styled “front page of the internet” offered a host of communities that met these criteria, while simultaneously offering a “live evolving snapshot of the most popular content from across the web” (Cenci, “Why scientists should”). Having spent countless hours within Reddit communities such as ‘r/soccer’ and ‘r/reddevils’, my gaze turned to the other communities that populated this space which seemingly “crystallises the unnavigable cosmos of information (and misinformation) that is the web into self-organising and moderating special interest communities” (Cenci, “Why scientists”). Despite its immense popularity as a unique space where original user-generated content takes precedence, it is an inexplicably underexplored territory within new media scholarship. Massanari’s book from 2015 offered a nuanced and fascinating glimpse into Reddit for both the uninitiated and veterans of the site. As she claimed, however, it remains embedded within a particular frame of time––from 2011 to 2014 (Massanari 1). For a dynamic and transient space like Reddit, such glimpses are informative yet not in the least exhaustive. Although it has retained its fundamental ethos, Reddit has undergone extensive change since the publishing of Massanari’s work. Aesthetically, its interface was redesigned in early 2018 to endow it with the sleekness of its contemporaries. Functionally, its front page sorting options have been diversified and the practice of “defaulting” certain communities was discarded in favour of a more democratic system of front page 1

curation. Exploring the space’s transformation over time in the sections to come, this research posits that Reddit’s ever-evolving character necessitates further investigation in a contemporary setting.

This research therefore aims to build on Massanari’s aforementioned foundational work, exploring subcultural formation and participation in the process of doing the same. By positioning Reddit as a platform that functions as an ecosystem with its distinct affordances and

inherent politics, I aim to utilise a unique methodological approach to ethnographically navigate the manner in which “issue publics” concerned with gender organise and operate within the space. To do so, I select four gender-related Reddit communities–namely r/TwoXChromosomes, r/MensLib, r/MensRights, and r/TheRedPill as case studies. These case studies will offer valuable insights into the manner in which these communities’ positions within the gender discourse are reflected in their culture. The communities will also offer insights into the worldview engendered through the rules, moderation policies, posts, comments, etc. within the spaces.

The forthcoming section of this research will detail the relevant aspects of the platform in order to acquaint uninitiated readers with its quirks. This will then set up chapter two, which will highlight the theoretical framework that this research operates under; combining literature on platforms, controversies/issues, and public debate to formalise the foundational tenets driving the exploration of the communities studied. The third chapter will tackle the research methodology––wherein the communities being examined will first be ideologically and historically situated in order to contextualise the eventual inferences gleaned from their study. Following this contextualisation, the approach to the study of these communities will be outlined. This approach utilises literature on ethnographic examination, controversy analysis, and digital methods to ground the methodological framework of this research. The latter part of the methodology will elucidate the process of constructing representative datasets and the exploratory digital methods that will be utilised to facilitate a comprehensive study of the sampled communities. Following that, the fourth chapter will outline and discuss that findings from the case studies, which utilise the aforementioned methodology in the pursuance of meeting underlying research goals. To conclude, I will summarize my general inferences and outline directions for future research.

1.1 Reddit and its discontents

Inspired by link-aggregating websites like del.icio.us and Digg, Reddit was launched as a space that enabled the sharing of “original and reposted content from around the web” (Massanari 2). Del.icio.us’ ‘Popular’ page, which contained its most bookmarked links, influenced Reddit founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman to refine the notion of an authentic ‘front page’, having grown frustrated of “sifting through noise” (Fiegerman, “Aliens in the Valley”) on technology and social bookmarking websites (Fiegerman). By introducing the ‘comment’ feature on posts and making their code base open source in order to facilitate the creation of new ‘subreddits’ by users (also called ‘redditors’), Reddit continued to innovate and empower their user-base over the years, while their direct competitors staggered and fell behind. Consequently, Reddit stands among the 25 most popular websites globally and serves as a fascinating example of a space fundamentally sustained by user-generated content and interaction. More importantly, its daily page views and time spent per visitor is greater than most of its precursors on the list––including giants like Facebook and Instagram (Alexa, “The top 500 sites on the web”).

With user-empowerment as a chief factor of Reddit’s contemporary popularity, an exploration of the design choices that facilitate the sustenance of this user-directed system is warranted. The creation of ‘subreddits’ is one such exemplary design choice. A subreddit (also called “sub”) is typically a Reddit forum dedicated to a specific topic, and is referred to on the website using the prefix ‘r/’. For example, the subreddit for the discussion of global news stories is r/worldnews. Data from 2018 (Reddit Metrics) indicated that over 1.2 million subreddits populate the site, where registered users not only post news content (r/news, r/worldnews), but also original/remixed content, such as memes (r/dankmemes, r/wholesomememes, etc.), cute pictures of animals (r/aww, r/eyebleach, etc.), solicitations for advice or information (r/askscience, r/AskReddit, etc.), or niche interests (r/DnD, r/hiphopheads, etc.) (Massanari, 3). In order to ensure that the content and discourse within a subreddit complies with both the community and Reddit’s general rules and content policy, it is managed by moderators––who

possess the power to censor/delete content and ban/suspend users. Moderation is a “significant time and resource commitment” (Massanari, 32), as the process of efficiently managing a subreddit generally requires that moderators must “attract an audience of willing contributors, set and enforce rules around the kind of content contributors submit, manage disputes between redditors that occur publically in the subreddit’s comment sections, create and modify the subreddit’s Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) file as appropriate, and remove inappropriate comments and/or content” (32). The modification of the CSS by moderators results in the stylisation of a subreddit’s appearance, which further enhances user-experience. Thus, each subreddit has its own distinct flavour––as determined through its rules, content, and style.

In addition to offering a diverse range of communities that users can engage with, Reddit offers an effortless sign-up process––requiring minimal personal information. As a result, redditors operate under pseudonyms, as no “unitary identity” or “real name” policy is enforced (Massanari 50). Reddit’s sitewide content policy strictly condemns publishing private or identifying information about users––also known as doxxing, further safeguarding the real identities of its users. However, redditors are only pseudo-anonymous as it is possible to view their post and comment history by clicking on their profile, which in turn can help ascertain other basic information about them. The pseudo-anonymous nature of reddit coupled with its strict stance on doxxing “creates a space where individuals may be willing to disclose more information about themselves with the sense that it is not tied to their ‘real’ identity” (Massanari, 51). This is particularly evidenced in the “throwaway” culture that prevails on the site–wherein an individual tactically utilises a new “throwaway” account discussing particularly sensitive information. Other redditors are thus unable to determine any additional information about the individual as the throwaway account does not have any post or comment history to glean inferences from.

Reddit also possesses a voting system that affects the visibility of posts and comments. An “upvote” serves a similar purpose as a “like” on Facebook, whereas a “downvote” functions as a “dislike”––which is a function that is uncommon to most social media platforms. Upvotes and downvotes are not public––meaning one cannot “click on a given link and see a list of all the redditors who upvoted it” like one can on Facebook or Twitter (Massanari, 27). However, what

is displayed on each post/comment is its score, which is an approximation of the net difference between the upvotes and downvotes it receives. Reddit’s default setting makes high-scoring posts appear at the top of subreddits, with particularly high-scoring posts making it to r/popular or r/all. Similarly, high-scoring comments appear at the top within the posts that they were made on. Reddit administrators are wary of the ways in which the voting system can be gamed to make certain posts more visible, and thus they defend against vote manipulation and spam by “fuzzing” votes for the most popular links (Massanari, 114). It is also possible to arrange the appearance of posts and comments by newest first, or most “controversial” first––with controversiality being determined by the parity between upvotes and downvotes and the number of sub-comments received. This provides a far more democratic dimension to Reddit (when compared to other social media), with content that features prominently being chosen by the users rather than through corporate advertising. A derivative of Reddit’s voting system is its karma system. The karma system applies to accounts rather than posts/comments, and karma–akin to score–is calculated by subtracting the downvotes an account receives for the posts/comments an account composes. Massanari notes that although karma is often derided as a useless metric by redditors themselves, it can possess “real power” because it “offers a concrete articulation of the perceived value of contributions that a particular redditor makes to the community” (116).

A user’s subscriptions determines the appearance of their homepage feed. Reddit’s administrators had previously “selected a set of communities to feature for all new users” (u/simbawulf, “Reddit’s new signup experience”), which they called the ‘defaults’, in order for new redditors to “discover the rich content that existed on the site” (u/simbawulf, “Reddit’s new”). However, in 2017 the administrators changed the sign-up process, introducing the ‘popular’ page (r/popular), which displays a safe-for-work (SFW) glimpse of the trending posts from across the platform when accessed. As fellow users determine the popularity of a post through the voting system, new users are able to discover and navigate new communities with minimal administrative interference. In addition to the popular page, users can also get an all-inclusive look into Reddit through the ‘all’ page (r/all)––which does not filter out NSFW subreddits. Consequently, users can experience Reddit through four distinct ‘feeds’: their

home-feed–which only displays posts from communities they subscribe to; r/popular–which displays mildly filtered trending posts; r/all–which displays unfiltered trending posts from across the website; and r/original–which displays posts marked as original content (OC)––implying they are the handiwork of the posts’ original posters (OPs). In addition, redditors are also afforded a diverse array of post-sorting options within the aforementioned feeds.

For the home feed (which only displays content from redditors’ subscriptions), these options include ‘hot’–which displays trending posts; ‘best’–which is a more personalized version of ‘hot’ with a faster post turnover rate; ‘new’–which displays posts in reverse chronological order; ‘top’–which displays the highest scoring posts based on a time threshold that can be controlled (e.g. past hour, past 24 hours, past week, etc.); controversial–which displays posts with upvote to downvote ratios of close to 1 and has a controllable time threshold akin to ‘top’; and ‘rising’–which displays posts rapidly receiving upvotes. Meanwhile, since r/popular, r/all, and r/original do not account for a users’ subscriptions, the option to sort by ‘best’ is unavailable. The popular feed instead offers the ability to sort posts geographically, permitting a glimpse at popular posts from different parts of the globe.

2 Theory: Of Platforms and Communities

Akin to my own research, contemporary studies of Reddit position it as a “participatory platform” (Massanari, 62; Ging, 4). However, it is first important to qualify it as such through a thorough understanding of platforms and their operation. A rather succinct characterisation of platforms is Bratton’s “platforms are what platforms do” (Bratton, 41). So, what is it that platforms do, and how does Reddit fit this description?

According to Bratton, “platforms centralise and decentralise at once, drawing many actors into a common infrastructure” (46). Reddit particularly exemplifies this paradox, creating a shared space with overarching formal codes of conduct for redditors to congregate, while simultaneously offering a diverse selection of communities to participate in––each possessing their distinct style and underlying logics. While ultimate authority is centralised within the firm grasp of Reddit administrators, everyday administration is largely decentralised––being managed by subreddit moderators. Platforms are also “formally neutral”, but remain “uniquely ideological in how they realise particular strategies for organising their publics” (46). The ideological underpin of contemporary platforms can generally be described as neoliberal, offering a freedom of choice within a seemingly free-market of content. On Reddit, this freedom of choice is expressed through the voting system–where high-quality posts are expected to rise to the top; and through subscriptions––with redditors generally subscribing to subreddits that are interesting and well-managed. Reddit also engenders the techno-utopian (and cyber-utopian) views characteristic of Silicon Valley-based platforms––ambiguously and paradoxically combining neoliberal economic policies with the anti-corporate ideology of the left (“Cyber-Utopianism”). As a result, collaboration and communication on Reddit are presented as a genuine emancipatory political tools, especially exemplified through Reddit’s 2017 campaign for net neutrality in the United States in the face of potential its potential elimination by the country’s Federal Communications Commision (Ingram, “Reddit flexes its muscles over net neutrality”).

Bratton additionally notes that platforms do not follow “detailed premeditated master plans; rather they set the stage for actions to unfold through ordered emergence” (47). This is

particularly evident in platforms’ reliance on user-generated content and their careful positioning of themselves as a vehicle rather than a producer or patron of the content they host––which consequently shields them from legal liability for the content posted by their users. Reddit particularly values original content, even going so far as to create a special section dedicated to original content that can be accessed through its front page. Platforms also indulge in a “rigorous standardisation of the scale, duration, and morphology of their essential components”, which consequently “makes platforms predictable for their users, but also allow them to support idiosyncratic uses that platform designers could never predict.” (Bratton, 47). Crucially, platforms are “formally open to all users, human and nonhuman alike” (Bratton, 49). This particularly interesting notion is supported by the fact that a user can communicate with a platform’s systems and economies provided its “actions are interoperable with the protocols of the platforms” (Bratton, 49). Reddit showcases this communication by nonhuman users through the bots that populate it. These bots–once programmed and introduced into Reddit’s infrastructure–perform a variety of functions. For instance, AutoModerator bot utilised by certain subreddits automates a variety of moderation tasks, reducing the workload of moderators while simultaneously maintaining order within a community (u/Deimorz, “What is AutoModerator?”). Besides a platform’s politics, its ‘affordances’ also provide revelatory insights, with the latter generally functioning as an expression of the former. Pioneered in the field of ecological psychology, Gibson presented affordances as what the “environment offers an animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill” (127). Affordances have thus been broadly understood as “what material artifacts such as media technologies allow people to do” (Bucher and Helmond, 3), or “possibilities for action” in even simpler terms. However, a more relational interpretation, which acknowledges the multidimensional relationship between technology and the user, brings an added contextual relevance. When understood as “multifaceted relational structure” between an object/technology and the user that enables or constrains potential behavioural outcomes in a particular context”, the affordances of platforms emerge as an enlightening site of inquiry (Evans et al., 2). Certain commonly-shared central affordances of social media platforms are “persistence”, “replicability”, “scalability” and “searchability” (Boyd, 46). These affordances account for the archived, duplicable, significantly visible, and accessible

(through search) character of content on platforms. These are “high-level” affordances, which are more abstract and representative of the “dynamics and conditions enabled by technical devices, platforms and media (Bucher & Helmond, 12). By extension, there also exist “low-level” affordances which are “feature-oriented” and therefore “located in the materiality of the medium” (Bucher & Helmond, 12). Within Reddit, these affordances would be subreddit formation, the voting system, the karma system, and threaded commenting. Low-level affordances are of most importance to this research, as they constitute the primary manner through which users engage with the platform and each other.

Significant to any platform are its unique combination of “styles, grammars, and logics” (Gibbs et al. 257), which Gibbs et al. term as a “platform vernacular” (257). These vernaculars emerge as a result of the manner in which the affordances of these platforms are “appropriated and performed in practice” (257). The notion of “appropriation” is particularly crucial to understanding platform vernaculars. As indicated earlier, a platform’s affordances shape user behaviour by “delimiting particular modes of expression or action” (Gibbs et. al, 257). However, as mentioned in the aforementioned description on platforms, users can appropriate affordances to serve functions that were unthought of when designed. For instance, while originally designed to index keywords, Twitter hashtags have been appropriated “through widespread community use and adaptation” for the purposes coordinating emergency relief, and social movements (#metoo), among numerous others (Bruns and Burgess, 3). Platform vernaculars thus possess a transformative nature, cultivated through repeated and ongoing interaction between the platform and its users. On Reddit, “play” acts as a compelling iteration of the platform vernacular. Drawing from work by Sutton-Smith and Salen, and Zimmerman, Massanari highlighted play can simultaneously serve a multiplicity of functions such as being a “means of power exchange” (22) or “reinforcing community identity” (22), and that play occurred in a metaphorical space similar to a “magic circle”––which Reddit embodies for its dedicated users (22). This “multifaceted, complex, and emergent” (22) phenomenon crosses boundaries and is shaped directly by Reddit’s “design and underlying technological logic” (96). The most commonly observable patterns of play include articulating one’s responses through memes, puns, or reaction GIFs––which are made convenient to use by the platform’s design. Extending the concept of

platform vernaculars, this research contends that subreddits indulge in an identical reappropriation of the platform’s affordances in ways unique to the communities themselves. These “subreddit vernaculars” can offer significant wisdom regarding patterns of interaction within the communities, and their relation to the platform as a whole.

This research is not simply a study of Reddit as a platform, but concerned with a specific ‘issue’ or ‘controversy’ that is significant within the space––namely gender. In simple terms, issues/controversies can be understood as topical affairs that generate public contestation (Marres, 657). Further characterising controversies, Venturini notes that they involve “all kinds of actors”, with not only humans or groups of humans featuring, but also institutions, and so on. As a result, every controversy “functions as a ‘hybrid forum’”, a space of conflict and negotiation among actors who would otherwise happily ignore each other” (Venturini, 4). Additionally, controversies emerge “when ideas that were taken for granted start to be questioned and discussed”, and facilitate the emergence of surprising alliances amongst the most diverse entities (Venturini, 5). When applying this characterisation of controversies to the topic of gender, its qualification as a particularly vibrant one is demonstrable. For instance, the rights of the transgender community are presently in the spotlight, with the Trump administration attempting to stop them from serving in the United States military (Holden, “Trump Got What He Wanted”). Consequently, not only human actors but entire institutions like the United States military, federal government, and supreme court are participants within these affairs. Through the case studies explored within this paper, the manner in which an issue can bring together diverse actors and the manner in which their conflict is operationalised will be further illustrated. Controversies are salient to this research by virtue of their contribution to the development of the culture(s) of and within Reddit. If culture is formulated as a system of “shared values and understandings” arising from a “reservoir of shared ideas debates, stereotypes, facts, trivia, and so on”––the communities that populate Reddit can be analysed as “refraction chambers” that cultivate this system (Rieder, “Refraction Chamber”). Refraction chambers are not just spaces where like-mindedness prevails, but where “users are the driving force behind the production of shared values and understandings”––with similarity being “the result of labour on different levels and a product rather than an effet pervers, an unintended consequence” (Rieder, “Refraction”).

Additionally, this culture is transmitted and developed through the discourse around controversies––as “discourses structure how we think about things and accordingly how it makes sense to us to act” (Stanfill, 1061). The communities that organise themselves around issues–“issue publics”–are therefore pertinent to this research, and the manner in which these publics will be explored will be detailed in the section titled “approach” within the methodology.

Phillips and Milner underscored that “each seemingly singular public can be broken down into further publics unified by more specific common factors” (166). Thus, the public that is Reddit’s user base can be broken down into issue publics, and each issue public can further be broken down into smaller publics based on the position they occupy within the debate around the issue. Crucially, mainstream publics give rise to “counterpublics” (Phillips and Milner, 118), who liven up the sphere of public debate by challenging the hegemonic views of mainstream publics. Counterpublics have been characterised as consisting of marginalised voices that partake in what Mouffe terms as “agonistic debate”–which is “healthy, productive conflict between adversaries”– as opposed to “explicitly antagonistic conflict between enemies” (as qtd. in Phillips and Milner, 172). Typically, contestation between publics on Reddit manifests as trolling or ‘downvote brigading’––wherein groups of users (typically non-subscribers) launch a coordinated campaign to downvote submissions within a subreddit. Issue publics with differing positions warrant relevant classification, as examining the specificity of publics will further contextualise their relationalities and explicate their contribution to the discourse surrounding the issue. Thus, the methodological underpinning of this paper will account for the same.

Informed by the aforementioned theoretical framework, the research questions for this paper begin to appear. This paper is concerned not only concerned with examining specific issue publics, but also sets out to evaluate the unique methodological approach it utilises in the pursuit of this study. Thus, the research questions are two-pronged:

1) In what ways are the operational worldviews of gender-related issue publics on Reddit illustrated through their subreddit vernaculars?

2) How can the organisational ecology of these communities be extrapolated through their relations with other subreddits and the platform itself?

The pursuit of the answers to these research questions rests within this paper’s hypothesis that richly describing the operation of these issue publics requires the adoption of an interdisciplinary methodological approach. There is also an element of symbiosis between the two research questions, as answering either one of them informs the pursuit of the latter answer. This occurs because mapping the subreddits’ worldviews helps situate them within a cluster inside the ecosystem that is Reddit; while deciphering their organisational ecology further explicates their distinct positions within the discourse around gender––thus explicating their worldviews.

3 Methodology

Having detailed the theoretical foundation for this research, this section will outline the analytical framework and methods that will be applied for the investigation of the chosen subreddits. First, I will provide cursory insights into the chosen subreddits utilising a combination of pre-existing literature, and descriptions from the “community details”/FAQ sections of the subreddits. This will help contextualise the general operation of these communities, while simultaneously explicating the rationale motivating their selection. Following that, I will outline my approach to analysing these communities, the specific datasets that will be extracted for the purposes of analysis, and the methods employed in pursuance of inferences from the various datasets.

3.1 Reddit’s issue publics of gender

The four communities chosen for examination were r/TwoXChromosomes, r/MensRights, r/MensLib and r/TheRedPill. As mentioned earlier, these communities are linked, as they are all gender-related issue publics. In the case of 2XC, r/MensRights and r/MensLib, the focus on gender is self-evident, whereas TRP has a deeper philosophical embedding that warrants exploration. Beginning with 2XC, the following section will provide initial glimpses into the origins, politics, and contemporary state of affairs of the communities in order to contextualise the revelations that appear through their methodical study later in the paper.

3.1.1 r/TwoXChromosomes

TwoXChromosomes (2XC) is a community on Reddit that presents itself as “intended for women’s perspectives”, where both “serious and silly content” are hosted and the rights of all genders are supported. 2XC’s origins can be traced to an r/AskReddit post from 2009, where user u/hiddentofu suggested creating a space within Reddit that discussed topics such as beauty– which would appeal to a wider range of women, besides the more “geeky” women that were drawn to the website at the time (u/sundogdayze, “AskReddit Ladies”). Although the chromosomal reference in 2XC’s title may suggest a preference of biological womanhood, the community moderators clearly state in a stickied post that the community “welcomes everyone, 2 regardless of chromosomes” (u/kallisti_gold, “You are welcome”). Having been a relatively niche community for a few years post its inception in 2009, it has since grown into a particularly popular subreddit––boasting of over 12.3 million members, and ranking among the top 50 subreddits on the platform.

The growth of the community can be primarily attributed to it being made a “default subreddit” (Hern, “Reddit women protest”) in 2014 by Reddit’s administrators––meaning that every new Reddit account is automatically subscribed to it, thus greatly increasing its visibility. According to Reddit metrics, the community grew to twenty times its size within a year of being made default, and then doubled in size in the following year as well (r/TwoXChromosomes stats). Its defaulting was initially met with great concern as it increased off-topic and trolling activity on the sub––thereby challenging its status as a “safe place on Reddit for women” (Hern, “Reddit women protest”). However, the community has since adeptly coped with its increased visibility.

2 _{​A stickied post is one that is intentionally pinned to the top of a subreddit’s frontpage, and thus prominently visible} to everyone that visits the subreddit.

Figure 1:_{​ r/TwoXChromosomes Subscriber Count} (_​https://subredditstats.com/r/twoxchromosomes_​)

Interestingly, research by Panek et al. on participation within Reddit communities indicated that unlike the other burgeoning subreddits examined, as 2XC grew in size (in terms of unique commenters) its participation became less “unequal” (5). This implies a wider distribution of participation among the unique commenters rather than it being concentrated amongst an “elite few” (2). Considering that the study only examined six subreddits, the exact reason for 2XC’s status as an outlier within the study cannot be determined. However, Panek et al. note that certain online spaces are “explicitly intended as sites of discussion (and are labeled as such) while others may be places in which a small number of users can provide information and entertainment about a particular topic to a larger number of users”, with the former being inclined to be spaces that demonstrate a greater equality of participation (5). 2XC presents itself as a shining example of this discursive type of community. It functions more as a site of discussion and support rather than a place where experts share their knowledge––which would be more characteristic of a subreddit like r/AskHistorians.

3.1.2 r/MensRights_​

r/MensRights––as described by its moderator u/iainmf in my correspondence with him, “is a place to discuss the injustice men face because they are men”. Thus, it devotes itself to a discussion of topics like discrimination against men, with the qualifying factor for such discrimination being gender. Having derived its title from the ‘men’s rights movement’ (MRM), the subreddit was created in 2008–––making it the oldest of the subs examined for this research. Considering its contemporary politics, it is surprising to note that the MRM was an offshoot of the “second wave” feminism of the 1960s (Coston and Kimmel 369). Feminism’s critique of the “female sex role” was pertinent for some men, “who took the feminist call for women’s liberation as an opportunity to do some liberating of their own” (Coston & Kimmel 369). What emerged was the “men’s liberation movement” (MLM), which espoused the notion that traditional sex roles were harmful to men as well––who consequently were “exiled from the home, turned into soulless robotic workers, in harness to a masculine mystique, so that their only capacity for nurturing was through their wallets (Coston and Kimmel, 369).” However, as of the 1980s, the men’s liberation movement branched into two distinct directions due to their disagreement on the reason for men’s unhappiness. In one direction, the “mythopoetic men’s movement” and the “pro-feminist men’s movement” blossomed, whereas the contemporary MRM emerged in the other direction (Coston and Kimmel 371). Both the mythopoetic and the pro-feminist men critiqued traditional notions of masculinity. However, the former were neither feminist nor anti-feminist in their politics, while the latter understood feminism as being beneficial for everyone. On the other hand, the MRM departed from the MLM due to “what they observed as the cause of men’s problems”, which in their opinion was not traditional masculinity as much as discrimination against men––much of which occurred to the benefit of women. Feminism thus became the enemy, and was posited as “hateful ideology” that “turned normal healthy feminine women into a bunch of gold-digging consumerist harridans” (Coston and Kimmel 372).

Figure 2: _{​r/MensRights Subscriber Count (​}https://subredditstats.com/r/mensrights_​)

Although the community has been present on Reddit for longer than 2XC, it has a significantly lower subscriber count, sitting at 275k as of May 2019. Nevertheless, the community appears to be steadily growing after a brief slump in late 2015. On Reddit, the “flair” a post is awarded acts as a tag through which one can sort posts within a subreddit. Each subreddit devises its own flairs based on the themes its posts generally address. On r/mensrights, these flairs are “progress”, “activism/support”, “social issues”, “anti-MRM”, “humour”, “education/occupation”, “unconfirmed”, “false accusation”, “general”, “health”, “intactivism”, “marriage/children”, “legal rights”, “discrimination” and “feminism”. In light of the ideological framework underpinning the community, the content within the posts marked within these flairs is fairly predictable. The more obscure flairs––such as “intactivism” and “unconfirmed”––are for the discussion of circumcision and unconfirmed statements respectively.

3.1.3 r/MensLib

r/MensLib describes itself as a “community to explore and address men's issues in a positive and solutions-focused way” (r/MensLib). The subreddit aligns itself with a “pro-feminist” ideology, and hopes to “create active progress on issues men face, and to build a healthier, kinder, and more inclusive masculinity” (r/MensLib). The subreddit was founded in 2015 by then 31-year-old attorney Matthew Hodges, who was inspired by his observation of online “gender wars” to work towards fixing the issues raised by concerned groups that passionately argued with each other (Crockett “there’s”). The title of the subreddit draws from the aforementioned MLM of the 1970s. However, its politics are in alignment with that of the pro-feminist branch of the men’s liberationists. As of May 2019, the community consists of almost 70k subscribers, having doubled in size since the preceding year (r/MensLib stats).

According to Hodges, the some of the concerns that MensLib focuses on are the “overarching issue of masculinity”, “the education gap ”, “men’s mental health”, “men-specific 3 health issues and men’s access to health care”, and so on (as qtd. in Crockett “there’s a better way”). Although there is an overlap between the concerns shared by r/MensLib and the contemporary Men’s Rights Movement (MRM), the community seeks to tackle these concerns in a manner that is in allyship with feminism, rather than posit it as the “root of all of men’s issues” (Crockett “there’s a better way”).

3.1.4 r/TheRedPill_​

r/TheRedPill (TRP) is a community invested in discussing “sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men” (r/TheRedPill). Emerging within Reddit in 2012, it drew inspiration for its title from the concept of the Red Pill, which is an analogy derived from the popular 1999 film _{​The Matrix​, wherein the protagonist Neo has to choose} between taking one of two pills––blue or red. The blue pill would permit Neo to continue living a peaceful but ultimately delusional life, while the red pill would facilitate his unplugging from a simulated world and his exploration of genuine reality––ugly truths included. ‘RedPilled’ individuals (Red-Pillers) therefore consider themselves to be enlightened enough to see past or through the lies engendered by society––the primary one being feminism. Their vision of genuine reality involves acknowledging that “female oppression is a myth” and that “men are the ones holding the short end of the stick” (Love, “Inside Red Pill”). They also believe that feminism promotes “misandry and brainwashing” (Ging 3) and that there is an inherent difference between men and women due to evolution, with each having its designated role in society––namely professional work for men and childbearing and rearing for women.

Although the community is concerned about the “injustices” faced by men, it is unwise to consider red-pillers as MRAs because their primary focus appears to be pick-up artistry, and to a

3 _{​The education gap refers to the gap between graduation rates amongst men and women beginning as early as} elementary school, with men graduating at a significantly lower rate (Crockett, “there’s a better way”).

lesser extent self-improvement (Love “Inside Red Pill”). Interestingly, when considering its management by the platform’s administrators, TRP met the polar opposite fate as 2XC. Given the “shocking” and “highly offensive” content hosted within the subreddit, TRP was ‘quarantined’ in late 2018, in order to “prevent its content from being accidentally viewed by those who do not knowingly wish to do so, or viewed without appropriate context” (u/landoflobsters “Revamping the Quarantine Function). A quarantined subreddit can only be visited by users who willingly opt-in to view the community on Reddit, and can only do so using a Reddit account linked to a verified email address. In addition, communities under quarantine “generate no revenue, do not appear in non-subscription-based feeds (eg. Popular), and are not included in search or recommendations” (u/landoflobsters “Revamping the Quarantine Function”). Quarantined subreddits are nevertheless expected to comply with Reddit’s content policy, or potentially face a permanent ban.

Having been quarantined, the subreddit no longer displays statistics regarding its subscriber count––making its current membership quantitatively uncertain (as seen in the figure above). However, prior to being quarantined it possessed a significant and steadily growing subscriber-base––even larger than the pre-established r/mensrights. In addition, the subreddit presents itself as one within a larger network of communities––all of which are fundamentally linked by the red-pill philosophy. These communities–which interestingly have not been quarantined–include: r/RedPillWomen (for the ideology’s female followers), r/asktrp (“red pill discussion for personalized questions about specific situations”), r/ThankTRP (for red pill success stories and gratitude) , r/RedPillParenting (red-pilled parents discussing “raising kids in modern society”), r/altTRP (discussing sexual strategy for homosexual and bisexual lifestyles), and r/GEOTRP (“geographic analysis of sexual markets”). The community also provides a space for the red-pilled individuals to discuss topics not covered by any other subreddit within the network––namely r/TRPOffTopic.

Having contextualised the communities I have chosen to study, the reasons justifying their selection become far more apparent. Firstly, they function as stellar examples of highly engaged issue publics of gender. In addition to their sheer magnitude–ranging from tens of thousands to millions of members–they also account for over 9 million votes and over 800 thousand comments within the past year alone . This ensures that these communities possess a4 significant quantity of rich textual data that can be mined and examined in order to extrapolate the discourse around gender on Reddit. Additionally, these subreddits occupy distinct, and often oppositional positions within gender-related debates. In the case of TRP and r/MensRights, these positions have been elucidated in contemporary academic studies (Ging; Lumsden), but their relationalities remain underexplored. The data gathered from these subreddits will further aid in

4 _{2XC post votes: 7,074,150} 2XC post comments: 575,707 MensLib post votes: 300,761 MensLib post comments: 69,727 TRP post votes: N/A (quarantine) TRP post comments: N/A (quarantine) Mensrights post votes: 1,834,795 MensRights post comments: 173,755

the mapping of these relations through the methods that will be elaborated in the methodology section. Although these communities are not an exhaustive gallery of gender-related discourse on the platform, they constitute a representative portion of it by virtue of their size, engagement, and diversity of opinion.

3.2 Approach

When analysing such an issue, a particularly comprehensive framework for its analysis is the “cartography of controversies” developed by Bruno Latour. This particular approach rests on three basic premises. Firstly, it “invites scholars to use every observation tool at hand, as well as mix them without restraint” (Venturini 2). Second, it mandates an observation from multiple viewpoints. Finally, it recommends “valuing actors voices more than your own presumptions” (Venturini 3). As the remainder of the approach, and my data and methods section will reveal, this research fulfills these premises by indulging in what Venturini terms as “theoretical and methodological promiscuity”; utilising diverse datasets and methods in order to gather insights from multiple viewpoints (i.e. intra-subreddit vs inter-subreddit/platform-wide), and moreover respecting the voices of the actors that constitute the chosen issue publics by closely examining their participation within discussion threads to contextualise their opinions.

Although controversy analysis serves to elucidate the nuances of the debate regarding a controversy, there are no platform-specific techniques to effectively analyse controversies. This is where “digital methods” factor into this research, which are “necessary for the analysis of such an interdisciplinary and popular, volatile public debate” (Niederer 20). Rogers et al. describe digital methods as a “framework for research with a collection of medium-specific techniques and software tools to do analytical mapping work using the web and its data” (32). Digital methods emphasise following and “repurposing” the “methods of the medium”, which implies possessing the acumen to “not be caught off guard” by the instability of media or the ephemerality of content that are characteristic of social media (Rogers et al. 31). Digital mediation facilitates “social traceability”, and this research aims to mobilise this traceability through documenting and aggregating outlinks (referrals), specific keywords (significant terms), and other such traceable objects in order to “depict associations between actors, and substantive alignments” (Rogers et al. 31).

As mentioned earlier, this research concerns itself with an ethnographic examination of specific issue publics on Reddit––namely those pertaining to the issue of gender. Such an examination mandates the unraveling of what Clifford Geertz called “webs of significance” that are shared by members of the communities studied (5). By describing these webs of significance

as “culture”, Geertz highlights that ethnographic study “not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning” (5). Following Geertz, I aim to interpret, and not merely observe, the behaviour of the members of the sampled subreddit; because it is “through the flow of behavior–or, more precisely, social action–that cultural forms find articulation” (17). Where this research is concerned, the interpretation of cultural forms will be facilitated by a combination of previous studies of Reddit and these communities, and the data collected from within them. The articulation of this specific type of contextualised interpretation–known as “thick description” (Geertz, 6)–is amongst the chief catalysts of my research. As a “networked system of construable signs”, culture serves as an agent for contextualisation, through which behaviours “can be intelligibly–that is, thickly–described” (Geertz, 14).

The aforementioned webs of significance require an approach through which they can be adequately identified. An adaptation of literary scholar Franco Moretti’s ‘distant reading’ approach thus factors in to this research. Abandoning the ‘close reading’ approach of embarking on painstaking analyses of the semantic and syntactic intricacies of individual literary texts, Moretti sought to “mine huge databases that contained thousands of literary texts, to identify recurring patterns and large scale historical developments across national borders, and over whole centuries” (Schweighauser, “What is Distant Reading?”). Appropriating this approach for Reddit data specifically, I instead intend to similarly identify recurring patterns, but rather over the course of a decade (2008-2018), utilising post and comment data obtained from the subreddits being examined. This textual data is thus comprised of smaller bits of text, rather than being entire literary texts, as was the case in Moretti’s original approach. Rather than privileging a “narrow selection of literary texts” by well-established authors, distant reading “pries open the canon” to include otherwise overlooked works (Schweighauser, “What is”). Similarly, by including post and comment data from the entirety of each of the subreddits’ histories without setting any score thresholds, this paper’s approach promises a more comprehensive understanding of their respective cultures. However, the methodological approach for this research is not simply quantitatively-inclined, but instead inspired by Venturini and Latour’s “quali-quantitative” approach––which relies on digital technologies to “trace social phenomena

throughout the processes of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction that constitute them” (5). Quali-quantitative methods juxtapose ethnographic observation with statistical analysis by collecting and processing significant amounts of data, and tracking a “multitude of interactions” to distinguish their specific contributions. The vast swathes of decade-spanning data collected from the examined subreddits will be subjected to similar analyses utilising the methods described later in this section.

A pertinent entry point for such an examination is the platform’s affordances. Described in simple terms, affordances can be understood as “the perceived range of possible actions linked to the features of the platform” (Bucher and Helmond, 3). Importantly Bucher and Helmond positioned platforms as “specific kinds of digital environments” and affordances as reflecting the “complex co-evolution of users and environment”. Thus, “platform-sensitive” affordances research facilitates the comprehension of such “contextual relationality” (20). In the case of Reddit, I attempted to achieve this platform-sensitivity through medium-specificity, accounting specifically for affordances that are distinct to Reddit. These include, but are not limited to Reddit’s voting system, karma system, and threaded commenting. Although these affordances may have necessarily remained unique to Reddit any longer, they still serve as foundational means through which its users interact, with the upvote/downvote feature exemplifying what Hayes et al. would term as “paralinguistic digital affordances” (172). Paralinguistic digital affordances (PDAs) are “cues in social media that facilitate communication and interaction without specific language associated with their messages” (Hayes et al. 173). Depending on the subreddit being analysed, the upvote/downvote button can be used for the communication of a variety of simple signals, such as a comment being non-contributive or irrelevant. These signals in turn are designated through established codes of conduct, which are either directly expressed in the ‘rules’ section or gradually engendered through the discourse that occurs within the subreddit. “Cognitive affordances”–which “relate to naming, labelling, and/or site taglines and self-description” are also meaningful to this research as they “facilitate processing information, and are therefore tied to the social act of meaning-making” (Stanfill, 1063). An example of such an affordance on Reddit would be how members are referred to by communities they subscribe to. For instance, since Reddit enabling the depiction of the number of total subscribers and those

that are concurrently online, r/soccer frames its subscribers as “season ticket holders” and those online as “in attendance”, making for a relevant metaphor.

Figure 5:_{​ ‘Community Details’ section of r/soccer’s homepage}

Thus, being cognisant of this particular affordance allows for a deeper understanding of the presentation and framing of a community. When all of the aforementioned affordances are considered in conjunction, they elucidate how they “invite the behaviours and outcomes” that facilitate the extrapolation of a community’s webs of significance (Evans et. al., 6).

r/TwoXChromosomes, r/MensRights, r/MensLib, and r/TheRedPill are being utilised as case studies of gender-related Reddit communities in this research. Traditionally, researchers “examine each case expecting to uncover new and unusual interactions, events, explanations, interpretations, and cause-and-effect connections” (Hays, 218), which is in alignment with the purpose of my research as well. “Generalizability, however, is quite possible when based on several studies of the same phenomenon” (Hays, 219), thus through the analysis of the four subreddits concerning the same issue, I aspire to glean certain general inferences regarding the manner in which gender-related communities operate on Reddit.

In their data ethnography, Krieg et al. analysed the “organisational ecology” (“Anthropology with Algorithms”) of Erowid––a drug-related informational website and community, by constructing a page-like network of Erowid’s Facebook page. I believe the idea of the organisational ecology is an insightful one, and can be extrapolated to be applied to the Reddit communities being studied in this research. Rather than utilising a page-like network, I instead sought to identify the subreddits that the examined communities linked to on their homepages, in addition to those that are prominently refer to or are referred to by the examined

subreddits within their comments. The notion of an “organisational ecology” is also in harmony with digital methods practice of “following the networked structure of web data” (Rogers et al., 35). In this research specifically, being cognisant of the networked relations between actors enable the examined subreddits to be situated within a larger ecosystem (i.e. the platform)––further contextualising their outlook on the issue examined.

While enlightening, the textual elements of the subreddits’ posts and comments are not comprehensive enough in explicating their established culture. A closer examination of the subreddits’ homepages allowed for a better understanding of “how norms for technologies and their users are produced” (Stanfill, 1059). An exploration of the production of these norms can be facilitated through the ‘discursive interface analysis’ approach posited by Stanfill, who argued that web interfaces “structure action by making some things more possible than others” (1060). Additionally, in formulating web interfaces as “reflecting and reinforcing social logics”, interface analysis facilitates an informed understanding of the norms and values of a community––which is particularly relevant to this research (Stanfill, 1059). This approach accounts for affordances, but goes beyond to investigate “what is foregrounded, how it is explained, and how technically possible uses become more or less normative through productive constraint” (1063). Discursive interface analysis is also in alignment with this paper’s ethnographic approach––relying on an interpretation of these subreddits’ “embedded assumptions” about their purpose (Stanfill, 1062) through what is presented on their homepages.

When combined with representative data and sufficiently exploratory methods, these approaches can facilitate a rich understanding of the subreddits being examined, and further explicate their relations to one another and to communities all across the platform.

3.3 Data

Typically, digitally analysing social media platforms presents distinct methodological challenges, some of which are fortunately subverted in the case of Reddit due to the data-collection resources that exist for the platform. For instance, in a bid to “crack down on platform abuse” after the Cambridge Analytica debacle, Facebook restricted access to data available through its Graph API (application programing interface), complicating research efforts

that utilise its data. However, Reddit data is far more accessible through its API, along with transparent documentation for the purposes of data extraction. Jason Baumgartner further simplified the extrication process by collecting all post and comment data, and publishing on his website–– pushshift.io. The data from pushshift.io is hosted by Felipe Hoffa on Google’s BigQuery cloud platform, which utilises the processing power Google’s imposing infrastructure in order to facilitate superfast structured query language (SQL) queries on large datasets (“What is BigQuery”). As a result, smaller fragments of the massive dataset can be extracted effortlessly on BigQuery. The tables on BigQuery allow for one to extract specific aspects of Reddit data such as the author of a post/comment, the subreddit it was posted on, the date/time of posting, its score, its permanent link, and so on. Although the selection of the four specific subreddits significantly narrows the stream of data to pick from, selecting subsets still presents a methodological challenge due to the sheer magnitude of post and comment data available for those subreddits. For instance, in 2018 alone r/TheRedpill had upwards of 12500 posts and 2.7 million comments. Thus, not only was it paramount to extract data that were quantitatively significant, but also that which could provide meaningful insight when analysed.

In order to so, two types of samples were extracted using SQL queries on the Pushshift.io data. The first was a “full sample”, implying that it contained all obtainable data without setting any limiting thresholds such as timeframe or score (Rieder, “Refraction Chamber”). In the case of my research, this full sample contained all comments from the respective inceptions of the four communities until the end of 2018––which is the latest complete year for which Reddit data is available. The second type of sample I chose to collect was a “manual sample”, which was logistically efficient and “goes well with a more qualitative research outlook” (Rieder, “Refraction”). The sample’s logistical efficiency was achieved by setting score thresholds. As the score of each entry was determined by Reddit’s voting system–a particularly crucial affordance–setting score thresholds was in alignment with my affordances as entry-point approach. In addition, I also collected one screenshot per year of each of the subreddits’ interfaces utilising the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine––which archives internet pages in order to render them as digital artifacts appropriate for research. The following section will

outline the logic underpinning the construction of the aforementioned samples, and their utility for this research.

3.3.1 Dataset 1: Comprehensive

This “full sample” (Rieder, “Refraction Chamber”), containing all comments from the creation of each of the selected subreddits until the end of 2018. This meant I was able to access comments ranging as far back as 2008––which was the year r/MensRights emerged within Reddit. This sample facilitated the identification and tracking of significant words within the communities over time, and the distribution of those words across the platform. Additionally, this dataset was queried to extract subreddit referrals made both by and to the studied communities. Downloading this sample was challenging due to its immense size, so I instead queried the tables on BigQuery on a yearly or monthly basis where computationally necessary. The results of the query were then compiled thematically to extract the relevant information from this dataset.

3.3.2 Dataset 2: Manual

This dataset contained comments with a score greater than 100 (>100) from r/TwoXChromosomes, r/TheRedPill and r/MensRights, originating from the year of each of their respective inceptions . For r/MensLib–which is a relatively nascent community–I set a smaller5 score threshold (>50) in order to extract a sufficiently large sample. The reason the entries’ scores were used as a threshold was because it provided a sample of what was considered approved discourse within the communities. For instance, if a comment on a post is particularly resonant with the community’s underlying philosophy or politics, it is more likely to be upvoted––resulting in a high score. Conversely, comments made with the intention to troll are generally downvoted and possibly deleted by the moderators. Thus, setting an appropriate score

5 _{​Subreddits like 2XC and r/MensRights did not yield any comments with a score >100 in their inception year as} both the communities and the platform were nascent at the time.

threshold prevents reasonably “unrepresentative” comments from polluting the dataset. The manual dataset, as previously mentioned, is also logistically less demanding––making querying for data from within it much simpler. This particular manual dataset was used to contextualise the significant terms that were extracted from each subreddit using the full sample. The method for such contextualisation is elaborated in section 3.4.3.

3.3.3 Dataset 3: Subreddit homepages and archives

Using the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine, I was able to gather screenshots of each of the subreddits’ homepages across the years. Due to clearly examinable screenshots not being available for one particular date across every year, the time-frame for the screenshots generally differed depending on the subreddit. These screenshots facilitated the examination of the manner in which each the rules and aesthetic of each of the examined subreddits transformed over time. Additionally, I navigated through the current iteration of each of the homepages in order to facilitate a close reading of them, as they contained descriptions of their prevailing codes of conduct and demonstrated a framing of the space and its users. The homepages also contained links to “subs of interest” or “related subreddits”, which further facilitated establishing links between various subreddits.

3.4 Methods

3.4.1 Extracting Significant Words

An SQL script devised by Jason Baumgartner enabled me to extract “significant words” from the comment data for all the subreddits. The comment dataset was used because the comments are where almost all of the pertinent textual discussion within a subreddit is located, and thus serves as fertile ground for the mining of subreddit-specific words. The script calculates “significance” by identifying the frequency of a word’s appearance within a subreddit’s comments and the number of times it appears across all Reddit comments during a time period that one specifies, and assigning them variables (s_count and g_count respectively). The script then constructs the ‘s_ratio’ by dividing the s_count by the count of all the words used in the subreddit’s comments and the ‘g_ratio’ by dividing the g_count by the count of all the words used across Reddit’s comments during the specified timeframe. What ultimately emerges is a table containing a list of words, with their s_count, g_count, s_ratio, g ratio, s_to_g_ratio (s_ratio divided by g_ratio) and weight (s_count multiplied by g_count). One can either order the table by s_count to extrapolate which words are used most frequently on the subreddit, or one can order the table by s_to_g_ratio to infer the words most “significant” to the subreddit––meaning they appear more frequently within the space than anywhere else on the platform. As BigQuery found it hard to compute results for the entire year at once, I queried for the words using a quad-monthly time-frame and tallied the results on a yearly basis instead. In addition, I queried for words with an s_to_g_ratio of greater than 5 and limited the number of words extracted to 50, in order to analyse only those words that were most distinct to the subreddits in question. Thus, I was able to obtain a list of words that were not only appeared frequently on the subreddit (‘popular words’), but that were also more frequently seen on the subreddit when compared to the entirety comments of the platform (‘significant words’). These results, especially when ordered by significance, provide an interesting glimpse into the language distinct to the subreddits, and the manner in which they discuss the issues that concern them. Additionally, this distinct language is a constituent element of the subreddit vernacular that this research seeks to identify and analyse.

3.4.2 Tracing Concepts Across Subreddits

Through a perusal of the most significant words within the selected subreddits, I was able to identify certain terms that were particularly distinct to some of them. For instance, in the figure for r/TheRedPill, the terms “SMV”, which stands for ‘sexual market value’––a measure of one’s attractiveness to the opposite sex, and ‘oneitis’––a man’s obsession with a woman who “does not reciprocate” (u/MachiavellianRed, “Updated Glossary”), appear to be subreddit-specific terms. With the platform serving as the ecosystem the subreddits inhabit, their ecology is made explicit through tracing the distribution of subreddit-specific or generally distinct terms across the platform. In order to do so, I utilised an SQL script that specifically queried for the words in question on a yearly basis, extracting the names of the subreddits they appear on and the frequency of their appearance. I limited my results to the 20 subreddits within which the term appeared most frequently, so as to receive results that are more directly linked to the examined subreddits. The results that appeared further helped identify a cluster of subreddits within which the sampled ones can be situated, as the other communities may possess shared vernaculars or concerns. Situating the sampled communities within a larger network of subreddits serves the function of determining its organisational ecology.

3.4.3 Contextualising discourse with word trees

Identifying the significant terms for each subreddit gives us a glimpse into repeated usage of specific words, and “repeated elements tell us a great deal about texts” (Wattenberg and Viégas, 1). However, “with context more nuances and revealing themes appear”, which is particularly crucial in the ethnographic examination of any community––as said context are indicative of the “webs of significance” described earlier (Wattenberg and Viégas, 1; Geertz, 5). Merely querying for significant words fosters a loss of context by abstracting the words from their original composition. For instance, feminism/feminists are words appearing on all four subreddits’