reddit_researcher

I woudn't say "already made up your mind that the SJW is 'imaginary.'" I think it evident in the discourse across the site that the SJW is imaginary. Nobody identifies themselves as an SJW. This is a reactionary term made up by people who oppose the politics of the left, and can be used to accost anybody whose politics they dislike.

In terms of the attack on free speech in college campus's, I am a little wary about those who want to infringe on the freedoms of the press and speech found on public universities and attacked by public employees. However, i find these to have little to do with the censoring of discourse on a privately owned forum. These are not the same issues, and by conflating the two you are implying that those involved in the college campus's are the same as those on reddit, which I struggle to believe. Just like those who attack SJW's, you are lumping together individual groups of people to create your own point.

Several major events really influenced me during my research period, and before as well. I was very interested in Reddit's role during the SOPA/PIPA events during 2012, as well as Redditors role in supporting Net Neutrality during early 2015. I was also very interested in the economics surrounding the Secret Santa exchanges on Reddit, especially when they developed their own marketplace. I also followed In addition to events within the community, I paid particular attention to actions by the administration. Unfortunately, I published my dissertation just before everything with Ellen Pao went down, but I address the early stages of that brewing situation in my dissertation as well and developed some theoretical grounding for the resulting chaos.

I have an entire chapter devoted to GamerGate and /r/KotakuInAction and their counterpublic, /r/GamerGhazi. Meta subreddits like /r/TheoryOfReddit and /r/SubredditDrama helped me understand how Redditors understand themselves. I was very interested the displays of sexuality found on /r/TheRedPill and /r/TheBluePill. However, I still payed a lot of attention to the major default subreddits, and local city subreddits like /r/Denver and /r/Seattle. Finally, I have to shout out to /r/HipHopHeads which is one of my favorite communities on the site!

Thanks for the question1

Realistically, over my entire time on Reddit, I think the most interesting phenomenon is the decline in the quality and potential of public discourse on the site as it has increased in size. When I first got on reddit in 2007 or 2008, I thought the comments were enlightening and thoughtful. However, as the site got larger I actively saw declining content and declining comments. /r/all is a wasteland, and even within the smaller communities, quality comments are few and far between. I even feel like the philanthropic efforts of the site have declined since 2012 or so.

This is not to say the site is worthless now, but it just seems to have drastically changed as it grew, as I suppose every site does. It was just very interesting to experience it first hand over the last 8 years or so.

Well /r/TheBluePill is basically dedicated to mocking /r/TheRedPill, so I guess one is.

I agree with your point that ideal feminism doesn't discount the non-ideal form, but it seems to me that those who attack the non-ideal form often reject any benefits to feminism in general. Yes, some on Tumblr and on various college campus's project problematic versions of feminism, but by rejecting all of feminism because of this small population is unfair and problematic. It seems to me that spill-over from feminism doesn't require the discursive divisiveness found on reddit.