"Don't feed the troll": Shutting down debate about community expectations on Reddit.com

By K. Bergstrom. 2011

123 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While many online communities have explicit codes of conduct that one must follow in order to participate, there are often many “unwritten rules” or community expectations that users are expected to abide by. In this case study of www.reddit.com , a news aggregate Web site whose affordances seem to imply a transient and fluid approach to online identity, I outline an example of a community member (known as “Grandpa Wiggly”) who ran afoul of community expectations of authentic representation of one’s “true” off–line self. I also detail how accusations of trolling were used as a justification for shutting down debates about community expectations, as well as justifying actions against Grandpa Wiggly that violated the Reddit terms of service (and his privacy).

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Communication, Sociology and Political Science

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Citations in the corpus

Averaging Gone Wrong: Using Time-Aware Analyses to Better Understand Behavior (2016, methodology): “This might not be the case, as more than one user can share the same account [34] or one user can have multiple accounts [6].”
Online Media Forums as Separate Social Lives: A Qualitative Study of Disclosure Within and Beyond Reddit (2015, background): “However, redditors use pseudonyms, disposable usernames, and occasionally, alternative identities (Bergstrom, 2011).”
User Migration in Online Social Networks: A Case Study on Reddit During a Period of Community Unrest (2016, background): “Bergstrom (2011) notes that Reddit users have established social norms (particularly, account authenticity) and will react as a community when those norms are violated.”