Amy Giroux & Josejuan Rodriguez ENC 4416 July 22, 2013

Reddit: a Digital Forum Environment

Reddit.com is, as said by co-founder Alexis Ohanian a social news website, basically all that means is its a democratic front page of all the best stuff on the web. (2009 TED talk). In other words, Reddit is an online forum made to connect users with interesting information. Reddit has many subforums called subreddits, which contain threads which users can upvote or downvote. These threads are ranked by their upvotes and organized based off that ranking in their respective subreddit. Theres a premium section of the site, called Reddit gold that gives users access to new and in-testing aspects of the site. Theres also a gift shop, where you can buy Reddit related merchandise. Visitors and registered users alike first encounter the front page, which is an aggregation of the most upvoted content from subscribed threads ( for visitors, it is from the twenty most popular subreddits by default). One can access the site freely, but to participate in discussions and post content, one must become a registered user of the site. Registering is free, allowing Reddit to become a hub of discourse and distribution of information. This can be especially helpful in areas and countries who may not allow freedom of information and ideas. While it is a very interesting website that is immensely popular, it is not free from pitfalls. These pitfalls mainly concern the primary usage of only one language on the site as well as organizational issues, which can be observed through different aspects of the site. Some changes can be introduced that can be of great help, and allow for a truly democratic site.

Analytical Framework
In order to fully understand Reddit as a digital environment, we must delve deeper into areas such as technological use, users of Reddit, authors/content creation, visible and invisible texts, and environmental constraints. The analysis of these areas allows for a better understanding of how the site functions as a whole, how it interacts with other individuals and environments, and how it may be changed for increased efficiency and use. It will also explore how these aspects of Reddit interact with Reddits primary language use.

Technological Use
Reddit uses servers and cloud based services to display their website. They host and index the large amount of text posts and subreddits created everyday, but lack integration with other social media or translation services. At the moment, they also do not have any support for mobile platforms through apps, though a number of unofficial apps seek to close that gap. Reddit, however, has a mobile site which does make up for the lack of an app, but the mobile site is not as fluid or as intuitive as the desktop version of the site. Because of the growing influence of smartphones, many users access the site through the unofficial apps, which also allows information to be transferred from a broader range than simply through the use of the desktop site. Reddit users can take a picture or a video, comment or make a text post with ease wherever they have data access on their phone, while also communicating to the larger community. This allows Reddit users to be in almost constant connection with the community, substantially increasing the amount of information being shared. However, the unofficial apps seem to have even less support for non-English speakers, and therefore begin to limit the mobile Reddits range and user base again.

Users of Reddit
Reddit is frequented by mainly English speakers and individuals from English speaking countries. Individuals from the United States are the predominant users, with users from India, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia following in order of most usage. These top five countries are all countries with large English speaking populations (IHDS). Ultimately, Reddits audience consists of mainly white American middle class urban males, between the ages of 18-29 (Duggan), though the intended audience is the general populous. People from outside the US access and are registered users of Reddit, but the vast majority of Reddits audience hails from the United States. Because of this, a majority of the information posted on Reddit refers to events that are occurring in the United States, though some subreddits focus on information from outside the U.S. (r/world news being an example). Reddit is very much tailored for, and in many ways dependent on, Americans, as almost 50% of users are Americans (alexa.com). R/politics, for example is essentially centered around U.S. politics and makes very little mention of politics in other countries, despite not being named r/uspolitics or something of the like. This emphasis on American posting restricts the flow of information, and can lead to disintegration. This can cause members to create their own subreddit to share their information without the fear of having their information buried under information unrelated to their own. It is possible that because of the lingual limits Reddit places on its user base, there is not much support for non-English speaking member. This may cause, in part, the prevalence of the English speaking countries use of the site. The addition of translation software and search by language would allow for a broader audience than the current predominantly English content.

Authors/Content Creation
The authors of the site are Reddits users. There is a developer team that operates and compiles coding for the look and navigation of the site, and there is a blog that is updated and written by the developer teams, but the majority of content on the site is user created. This is not to imply that all users are authors, however. A number of users are lurkers, adding no content to the site, but rather voting up or down content and subscribing to different subreddits. In a sense, through upvoting and downvoting content, lurkers affect how the information is viewed and how it is interpreted by the audience. For example, a picture of police brutality that has been heavily downvoted may not reach its intended audience because of the non-content authors (lurkers) who evaluate it as not pertinent to the topic at hand. The voting system allows lurkers to become sub-authors, controlling the flow of information without actively adding any content. As stated earlier, many Reddit users are Americans, which leads much of the content to be United States-oriented. This leads to an information bias, as non U.S. issues are often met with little attention, unless the information is posted in a non U.S.-oriented subreddit. This gives rise to user created filter bubbles, which restricts the diversity of information presented on the site and causes Reddit to exhibit mainly American-centered content. The focus on American topics is not restricted to the flow of information, but also how the information is displayed and even how the website is written.

Visible and Invisible Texts

When a user first enters Reddits website, they are greeted with the front page, which includes a header, a banner with tabs, a numbered list of user submitted content, a right sidebar, and a table at the bottom. Each area has its own uses and is populated by specific writing. The header at the very top of the webpage has the 20 most popular subreddits or the registered users subscribed subreddits. Below it, a subreddit-specific banner is shown with tabs for hot, new, rising, etc. that allow the user to reorganize the list in the main part of the page. This list is

largest area of text on the site, including all user submitted content from the users subscribed subreddits. The right hand column is subreddit specific, but generally includes the search feature, whether or not the user is subscribed, how many users have subscribed to that subreddit, how many users are currently reading the subreddit, the description and rules for posting on the subreddit, a list of similar subreddits, and a list of the moderators. This helps regulate the specific social world that the subreddits circulating documents hold together. In The Social Life of Documents, Brown and Duguid mention the problem of disintegration because of the ease of forming new groups and new sub-worlds, and of abandoning or deleting other groups. Reddit definitely has this disintegration, but that is not to say it is a problem. Groups are created and destroyed based on their use by their specific community, and if they are deemed necessary or unnecessary, the community will guide its own growth with the creation of more documents and comments. These groups are often imagined communities, as Brown and Duguid mention. As a part of the internet where many people very far away from each other may congregate and communicate, it is rare for all the individuals in a specific community to know or to meet all the other individuals. There have been Reddit meet-ups, where groups of Redditors get together and form a physical community out of their previously imagined, social world they created together through their sharing of documents. Reddit, like all sites on the internet, has an underlying coding procedure to translate commands into the web page that we see when we access the site. Reddit uses Pylons as its framework, and it is open source, meaning that the source code is available to anyone who wishes to see Reddits code. There is no code on Reddit that supports social media integration; however, Imgur, Reddits go-to site for photo hosting, supports social media integration, and it can be used to share pictures and .gifs to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Stumbleupon.

One of the more interesting, and possibly most important behind the scenes coding that is used on Reddit is Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS for short. With CSS, one can adjust graphical content of a site, including but not limited to, banner colors, colors of the text, and color of hovered text. CSS is used throughout the front page and subreddits, though in the subreddits you see stark differences in CSS coding. The subreddit for the popular game Halo , r/halo looks quite different than the front pagethe banner contains the stylized logo for the series, the column to the right currently has an advertisement for a global championship, and the rules of the subreddit, which one must hover their mouse cursor over in order to see the details. This heavy editing of CSS modifies the document to best fit the imagined community. It pulls together the common interests that brought the imagined community together and provides images that reinforce the ideas conveyed by the subreddit or the theme of the subreddit. At the same time, it shows the interconnection between other subreddits as part of a larger community through the graphic of the Reddit alien. No matter how heavily edited through CSS and the graphical differences between the subreddits, the Reddit alien is always present in some form, even if just a part of the character. Though the hidden text of the site is written in its own language, the displayed language is not. Reddit is displayed primarily in English, which can lead to some constraints in the environment and interaction between other users.

Environmental Constraints
Reddit is a large and broad site. With regards to the scope of our project, we will be focusing on the following three constraints: lack of complete translation, no date or language search function, and default organization by hot. Because of the vast amounts of users and dynamic voting system, only a handful of the information shared on Reddit is actually viewed by users of the site. Many subreddits are imagined communities in their own right, and as a result, information that does not coincide with

the ideas of the group are overlooked or outright ignored. While it may be considered a given that the minority will not be given the same attention as the majority, it seems to stand in contrast to Reddits self-proclaimed democratic nature. Since Reddit is organized by hottest posts by default, this supports the filter bubbles caused by the democratic opinion of the internet, and therefore keeps those opinions on top, while other or opposing positions are lost as new posts. Perhaps reorganizing the front page to be sorted by newest by default would allow the many opinions of each subreddit to be heard more equally. Then, if a user still wishes to see what is popular, they may still use the hot tab at the top of the page. Reddits search function is slightly lacking in capabilityone can search by keyword, by author, and by subreddit, but there does not exist an advanced search feature that can allow one to search in a language other than English. That is to say, a user cannot write a word for query in their own language, rather the user needs to write a romanticized interpretation of the word. This also does not allow users to find all content in their preferred language easily. It also does not allow one to search for a specific item from a specific date. So, after a period of a few days (depending on the subreddit), old information is hard to find unless one goes page by page to find a thread. While Reddit is characterized by being a constantly moving and updating environment, as it thrives on the concept that reading [the content] at approximately the same time as other people is still important, having the ability to find older posts could be useful when searching for specific content during a specific time period (Brown and Duguid). Reddit is mainly in English. It supports translation, but very few languages are complete, and it does not translate user generated content. For non-registered users, Reddit only shows English content by default--all content in other languages are hidden, creating a distinct filter bubble of English content. When changing the selected language, any user may volunteer to translate and help translate the static content of the site. While waiting for users to volunteer and translate will give more accurate translations for the major, static parts of the site, it does not allow for a complete experience for a non-English speaker. Google translate integration translates

the entire webpage, including user generated content. The addition of a google translate widget on Reddits site would greatly benefit all non-English users.

Conclusion
To conclude, Reddit is a thriving digital environment that attracts people from all around the world. Through subreddits, Reddit houses a plethora of imagined communities who regularly (both positively and negatively) interact with one another, making the flow of information dynamic and, frankly, a tad overwhelming. Though the information does flow freely, the site is not free from constraints. The constraints we will be focusing on will include Reddits lack of non-English support, the organization of the front page by hot, and the lack of a search by date and language feature. We would like to add language support through the use of a Google translate widget, change the front pages organization to new by default, and add tags to allow users to search by specific dates and languages to further expand and improve upon Reddit as a global forum.

Works Cited

Duggan, Maeve, and Aaron Smith. Pew Internet 6% of Online Adults Are Reddit Users. Rep. N.p., 3 July 2013. Web. <http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Reddit/Findings.aspx>. IHDS. India Human Development Survey (2005)

Ohanian, Alexis. "How to Make a Splash in Social Media." Lecture. TED Talk. India. Nov. 09. TED. Nov. 09. Web.
"Reddit.com." Reddit.com Site Info. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/Reddit.com>.