Age and Gender in Reddit Commenting and Success

Abstract

Reddit is a large user generated content (USG) website in which users form common interest groups and submit links to external content or text posts of user-created content. The web site operates on a voting system whereby registered users can assign positive or negative ratings to both submitted content and comments made to submitted content. While Reddit is a pseudonymous site, with users creating usernames but providing no biographical data, an informal survey posted to a large shared interest community yielded 734 responses including age and gender of users. This provided a large amount of contextual biographical data with which to analyse user profiles at the first level of Computer Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA), articulated by Susan Herring. The results indicate that older Reddit users both formulate more complex writing and enjoy more success when rated by other users. Gender data was incomplete and as such only tentative results could be proposed in that regard.

Keywords

• Computer mediated discourse analysis
• CMDA
• Reddit
• Computer mediated communication
• CMC
• Age
• Gender