Published: Wed 05 February 2025
By Joseph Reagle
In social .
tags: advice reddit history
A new paper, and the first in work that will result in a book,
chronicling the emergence of the advice genre on Reddit.
Reagle, J. (2025). A history of the advice genre on Reddit:
Evolutionary paths and sibling rivalries. In First Monday . https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v30i2.13729
(author’s
copy )
ABSTRACT : Though there is robust literature on the
history of the advice genre, Reddit is an unrecognized but significant
medium for the genre. This lack of attention, in part, stems from the
lack of a coherent timeline and framework for understanding the
emergence of dozens of advice-related subreddits. Noting the challenges
of Reddit historiography, I trace the development of the advice genre on
the platform, using the metaphors of evolutionary and family trees. I
make use of data dumps of early Reddit submissions and interviews with
subreddit founders and moderators to plot the development of advice
subreddits through the periods of subreddit explosion (2009–2010), the
emergence of judgment subreddits (2011–2013; 2019-2021), and the rise of
meta subreddits (2020–2023). Additionally, I specify a lexicon for
understanding the relationships between subreddits using the metaphor of
tree branches. For example, new subreddits might spawn ,
fork , or split relative to existing subreddits, and
their content is cultivated by meta subreddits by way of
filtration , compilation , and syndication .
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