Evolution of Reddit: From the Front Page of the Internet to a Self-referential Community?

TL;DR

This comprehensive longitudinal study analyzes Reddit's evolution over five years, revealing increased topic diversification, attention concentration, and a shift towards self-referential content, transforming it from a web gateway to a self-focused community.

Contribution

This work provides the most extensive analysis of Reddit's evolution, highlighting changes in submission topics, community attention, and perception over five years.

Findings

Increasing diversification of topics over time

Concentration of attention on a few domains

Shift towards self-referential content within the community

Abstract

In the past few years, Reddit -- a community-driven platform for submitting, commenting and rating links and text posts -- has grown exponentially, from a small community of users into one of the largest online communities on the Web. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the most comprehensive longitudinal study of Reddit's evolution to date, studying both (i) how user submissions have evolved over time and (ii) how the community's allocation of attention and its perception of submissions have changed over 5 years based on an analysis of almost 60 million submissions. Our work reveals an ever-increasing diversification of topics accompanied by a simultaneous concentration towards a few selected domains both in terms of posted submissions as well as perception and attention. By and large, our investigations suggest that Reddit has transformed itself from a dedicated gateway to the Web to an increasingly self-referential community that focuses on and reinforces its own user-generated image- and textual content over external sources.