Legends: Folklore on Reddit

TL;DR

This paper introduces Reddit legends, a collection of iconic posts, and demonstrates their characteristics as folklore, enabling systematic analysis of their cultural significance and transmission on Reddit.

Contribution

It provides a typology and analysis framework for Reddit legends, establishing their status as folklore and demonstrating their suitability for systematic study.

Findings

Reddit legends exhibit consistent form and cultural significance.

They undergo spontaneous transmission similar to traditional folklore.

Reddit legends are amenable to text-based systematic analysis.

Abstract

In this paper we introduce Reddit legends, a collection of venerated old posts that have become famous on Reddit. To establish the utility of Reddit legends for both computational science/HCI and folkloristics, we investigate two main questions: (1) whether they can be considered folklore, i.e. if they have consistent form, cultural significance, and undergo spontaneous transmission, and (2) whether they can be studied in a systematic manner. Through several subtasks, including the creation of a typology, an analysis of references to Reddit legends, and an examination of some of the textual characteristics of referencing behaviour, we show that Reddit legends can indeed be considered as folklore and that they are amendable to systematic text-based approaches. We discuss how these results will enable future analyses of folklore on Reddit, including tracking subreddit-wide and individual-user behaviour, and the relationship of this behaviour to other cultural markers.