My friend Jason Baumgartner (stuck_in_the_matrix on Reddit) performs an extremely valuable service in pulling every single comment and post from reddit and storing them on a site that anyone can access (https://files.pushshift.io/reddit/). In contrast with Facebook (who just blocked Netvizz, the main way academics scrape data) and Instagram (who are similarly restrictive about the data you can use), that makes Reddit an extremely open platform for research and analysis.

Given that reddit is one of the most popular sites in the world (particularly in the US), it’s a shame that so little research has been done on its social dynamics. Quick shout-out for existing work:

Adrienne Massanari has written a book, as well as multiple papers on Reddit, with a particular focus on the way it facilitates the creation of “toxic techno cultures” like GamerGate and The Fappening.

Alex Halavais has a paper in First Monday which looks at a number of different subreddits and thinks about how reddit users draw upon evidence.

My own work has been published on Quartz, the New Statesman, and the LSE Impact Blog, using computational methods based on Jason’s data to analyse the linguistic practices of the alt-right and show how the various communities are connected. I do some temporal analysis of the word “cuck”, and also look at the “dictionary” of the alt-right. I’ve also made arguments about why Reddit refuses to ban The_Donald, a notorious source of hate speech. And then there’s my Reddit fanboy article.

If there’s more, let me know and I’ll happily add it.