Reddit: Participatory Culture and the Hivemind

What is Reddit?
Reddit describes itself as the "front page of the Internet", displaying content submitted by registered community members. The website is essentially an online bulletin board where members can create text posts, as well as posts with links to other websites to share articles, pictures, and videos. With over 200 million unique visitors and over 3.6 million logged in community members per month , there is an abundance of user submitted content. To make the content more easily accessible, they are divided into niche communities called "subreddits". Members can create their own customized Reddit experience by selecting from the 9,330 active subreddits   and subscribing to those that appeal to their interests.

The posts on reddit are shown in order of popularity, with the most recent popular posts displayed on the front page. When posts are submitted to Reddit, community members can vote for it ("upvote") or against it ("downvote"). The participatory culture of Reddit allows for users to freely submit content and express their opinions by voting or commenting, however, Reddit is "occasionally chastised, even from the inside, for sameness in opinions and groupthink" .

Research Questions

 * What is groupthink/hivemind and how does it affect the participatory culture on reddit (e.g. encourage conformity, discourage posts and discussion that challenge the existing consensus)?
 * Does seeing what others think about something change a person's initial feeling? (i.e. Does seeing how many votes a post/comment has affect how a person feels about it?)

Research Method
I will research the idea of the "hivemind", and the ways in which it affects a member's participation on Reddit. I will examine the herding effect that is apparent in its voting system by analyzing live data. The herding effect is a snowball effect where the initial vote can sway any subsequent votes to be in its favour, such as how seeing an upvote can change the person's mind about how they initially felt about something.

Why is this interesting?
Reddit is a community made up of smaller communities. As each subreddit is focused on a specific area of interest, the posts can be tailored to its members. For example, the “gameofthrones” subreddit members can discuss the show at length with other fans, while members of “buildapc” can give each other advice on building a pc. The concept of a collection of communities appeal to people because they can choose which communities they want to be a part of, creating their own personalized environment. It also has different ways for participation such as voting and commenting, giving the members different levels of interaction. This could be what drives people to visit Reddit, and it's interesting to see that over 7.8 billion pages were viewed in just the last month.

It’s also interesting to see that among the vast number of posts, there is a pattern on the types of posts and comments that become popular. In Reddit, there is a tendency of groupthink - where a general consensus develops among the members. The popularity of a post or a comment is affected by how well it goes with the status quo. I'm also interested in the herding effect, where one single upvote can convince nonvoters to join in, and also encourage positive votes from those who might have otherwise voted negatively or abstained .