Table of Links
Abstract and 1. Introduction
2. Related Work
3. Methodology
4. Results
5. Discussion
6. Conclusion, References, and Appendix
In this section, we briefly review the work in three research areas related to this article: the impact of mainstream media on social media activity, massive gr
2.1 Impact of Mainstream Media on Social Media Activity
Mainstream media coverage, such as newspaper articles, television programmes and radio broadcasts, on political or social topics can lead to increased awareness of that topic on social media, such as Reddit. Moreover, elevated interest in an event by mainstream media can impact the number of users as well as their activity on social media platforms. For example, Chew et al. [7] and Tausczik et al. [31] examined the trajectories of activities on social media (Twitter and web blogs) during the H1N1 pandemic and noticed that peaks in user activity coincided with major news stories. Similarly, Gozzi et al. [11] showed that during the COVID-19 pandemic, user activity on Reddit and searches on Wikipedia were mainly driven by mainstream media coverage.
The popularity of a topic in mainstream media can also lead to an increase in moderation activities on social media platforms, particularly on Reddit. For example, Reddit’s administrative interventions caused by violations of their content policy for toxic content occurred more frequently as a result of media pressure [13]. Moreover, mainstream media attention on subreddits with toxic content further exacerbated the toxicity of their content [13]. Horta Ribeiro et al. [18] further studied user activity and content toxicity after r/The_Donald and r/incels were banned due to media-driven moderation. They found a significant decrease in users’ posting activity, but an increase in activities associated with toxicity and radicalization.
Our work is unique in that through the analysis of r/antiwork we study two simultaneous mainstream media-driven impacts on social media: 1) the massive growth in subscribers to r/antiwork coinciding with increased coverage of the Great Resignation by mainstream media, and 2) a spontaneous decrease in user activity triggered by a heavily criticised interview of an r/antiwork moderator on Fox News. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first quantitative study of the impact of spontaneous decreases on Reddit. Although previous studies examined the decreases in user activity after moderation [13, 17], these decreases were due to platform bans rather than spontaneous user behaviour.
2.2 Massive Growth in Social Media Users
A topic often studied in social media is the growth in new users [21]. Previous studies suggest that an influx of newcomers can cause online community disruption due to new users failing to adhere to community norms [21] or cause an information overload in a given online community [19]. In recent years, several studies analyzed the impact of a massive growth of users on social media. Kiene et al. [20] present a qualitative study of the massive growth of the subreddit r/NoSleep, demonstrating that the massive growth of the subreddit did not cause any major disruptions. Lin et al. further showed that communities can remain high-quality and similar to their previous selves after the influx of new members [23]. The work of Chan et al. illustrates that a sudden spike in the number of users is a source of potential disruptions for an online community, however large communities are less impacted than smaller ones [6]. Additionally, Haq et al. [15] examine linguistic patterns on r/WallStreetBets, suggesting that writing style differs significantly between longterm users and new users resulting from a period of sudden growth. Our work studies the impact of the massive growth in the number of users on r/antiwork. Our analysis provides a new perspective on how the behaviour of different types of users (i.e. heavy and light posters and commenters) are affected by subscriber growth.
2.3 Social Meda Analysis of Reddit
Reddit, as one of the most popular social media platforms, is widely used to study online communities and social phenomena. Many studies focus on the analysis of specific subreddits. Ammari et al. [2] analysed gender stereotypes on r/Daddit and r/Mommit, and Sepahpour et al. [27] compared audience effects of r/Daddit and r/Mommit with r/Parenting. Leavitta et al. [22] studied how the content of different topics on r/sandy, a subreddit dedicated to hurricane Sandy, changed over time. Horta Ribeiro et al. [18] explored the impact of the ban of the subreddit r/The_Donald on user activity and content toxicity. Haq et al. [15] focused on the impact of sudden community growth in r/WallStreetBets during the GameStop short squeeze in January 2021. Our work is somewhat similar to [15] in the sense that both works study the influence of massive growth in users caused by specific external events. However, we analyse changes in user behaviour and discussion topics, whereas Haq et al. focus on the writing style of long-term and new users. Other studies of Reddit communities investigated community loyalty and successes [8, 12, 14], topic popularity prediction [1], and multi-community engagement [16, 30].
