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• CAREER FEATURE
• 01 April 2024

How scientists are making the most of Reddit

• Hannah Docter-Loeb 0

Hannah Docter-Loeb is a freelance writer in Washington DC.

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It has been almost 18 months since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, now known as X. Since the tech mogul took ownership, in October 2022, the number of daily active users of the platform’s mobile app has fallen by around 15%, and in April 2023 the company cut its workforce by 80%. Thousands of scientists are reducing the time they spend on the platform ( Nature 613 , 19–21; 2023 ). Some have gravitated towards newer social-media alternatives, such as Mastodon and Bluesky. But others are finding a home on a system that pre-dates Twitter: Reddit.

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Nature 628 , 221-223 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00906-y

Fiesler, C., Zimmer, M., Proferes, N., Gilbert, S. & Jones, N. Proc. ACM Hum. Comp. Interact. 8 , 5 (2024).

Article   Google Scholar  

Proferes, N., Jones, N., Gilbert, S., Fiesler, C. & Zimmer, M. Soc. Media Soc . https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211019004 (2021).

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The way we search is changing. The era of AI and influencers brings baggage in the form of distrust and skepticism in the digital channels users rely on most.

Reddit, filled with crowd-sourced advice and community-verified information plays an increasingly important role in the way people search, discover, share, and consume trusted content.

No matter where your purchase journey begins, all roads lead through Reddit, to get the validation and credible information you’re after.

This report by Reddit, GWI and AmbassCo dives into the evolving search behaviors we’re seeing, and what the overlap between search, conversation, and community means for your media mix.

Search is evolving

Influencers, AI, and paid-for results have polluted feeds, making it harder to search for the right answers. The answers they do find are increasingly unreliable.

To plug the gaps, search is shifting

Overall, expectations of search are rising. When searching for their next favorite purchase, shoppers want convenience, context, and consensus to help make more informed decisions.

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Social algorithms have changed expectations of online shopping. Instead of conducting product research, Gen Z expects brands and products to come to them.

They’re not content with generalized responses: they have specific questions, and they want specific answers.

Trust is created through human opinions shared in back and forth conversations and discourse. Gen Z crave dialogue that ultimately creates consensus.

All roads lead through Reddit

We were made for this moment. A deficit of trust in digital culture is leading people back to Reddit. That’s why seeking opinions from networks or communities is the #1 reason people use Reddit for product research.

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Reddit 101 for Scientists

Author: Penny Freedman

When it comes to utilizing social media in the science community, you might not automatically think about including Reddit into your activities. While Reddit threads may have a reputation for being controversial, there is another side to Reddit that is both important and useful to the scientific world.

What exactly is Reddit?

You can think of Reddit as one giant virtual conference for every discipline and subject you could imagine where people break off into smaller groups -called subreddits- to talk about topics interesting to them. When you first enter Reddit it looks like one large message board. When you register for an account you can post content and vote posts up or down the page, helping to determine what will receive the most attention.

What subreddits do I even begin with?

If you’re interested in a more general discussion on science, start with  http://reddit.com/r/EverythingScience . It’s a place for people to talk about anything and everything having to do with science. You can filter by field, add your thoughts to discussions already taking place, or start a new discussion by submitting a link to something you are interested in – a blog post, video, news article, editorial, etc.

If you’re looking for a more defined discussion on peer-reviewed science, head on over to The New Reddit Journal of Science at  http://reddit.com/r/science . There you may only submit links to published peer-reviewed research. Get the conversation started on your work or a peer’s work!

What is an AMA?

An AMA is short for “Ask Me Anything.” A scientist arranges a time with Reddit moderators to discuss a specific topic related to their research or interests. You submit a brief bio and summary of what you would like to discuss, and the Reddit community is given the chance to submit questions before the AMA start time. There is a submission guide  with detailed information on how to get started with setting one up. An AMA is a great way to get a conversation started on items that are of particular interest to you, and a way to share your expertise with people interested in studying or working in the same field, or just interested in learning something new.

Springer editors and authors have hosted a few AMAs, including:

• An AMA on rare and neglected diseases
• An AMA on American politics
• An AMA on realistic robots

How do I establish myself as a qualified scientist in my field to the Reddit community?

Reddit uses something called flair to designate who is a trained scientist, doctor, or engineer. The flair will present as a small bar next to your user name, noting your title and/or education level (such a Professor of Biology, PhD, etc.). When you add this bit of information people will understand that the comments you provide are knowledgeable and valuable. Once you have created your account reference  these instructions  to get your flair.

How is using Reddit any different than posting on other social media sites?

Reddit gives you the opportunity to share your knowledge and expertise in a more detailed, conversational way. You can find people discussing topics at length that you are interested in and can contribute meaningfully to. Unlike social media platforms that are centered around creating a personalized profile that is all about you, Reddit prides itself on being a community. The things you share should not be overly promotional, but should contribute to the discussion as a whole. Joining the discussion can help serve to expand your network and reach.

Penny Freedman is a Marketing Manager on the Author Experience & Services team based in the New York office. She works closely on sharing insight and guidance on the benefits and services available to our editors, reviewers, and authors.

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Disguising Reddit sources and the efficacy of ethical research

Joseph reagle.

Communication Studies, Northeastern University, 215 Holmes Hall, 43 Leon St, 02115 Boston, MA USA

Associated Data

Not applicable. Research data are: (1) research reports, (2) phrases from those reports taken from Reddit, and (3) interviews with the authors of the reports. The first two datasets are confidential so as not to embarrass researchers. The third set is confidential because they were obtained via a consent form that sated: “The confidentiality of your research records will be strictly maintained. Records of our discussion will be (1) kept separate from this consent form, (2) not shared with others, and (3) kept on an encrypted file system.”

Not applicable.

Concerned researchers of online forums might implement what Bruckman ( 2002 ) referred to as disguise . Heavy disguise, for example, elides usernames and rewords quoted prose so that sources are difficult to locate via search engines. This can protect users (who might be members of vulnerable populations, including minors) from additional harms (such as harassment or additional identification). But does disguise work? I analyze 22 Reddit research reports: 3 of light disguise, using verbatim quotes, and 19 of heavier disguise, using reworded phrases. I test if their sources can be located via three different search services (i.e., Reddit, Google, and RedditSearch). I also interview 10 of the reports’ authors about their sourcing practices, influences, and experiences. Disguising sources is effective only if done and tested rigorously; I was able to locate all of the verbatim sources (3/3) and many of the reworded sources (11/19). There is a lack of understanding, among users and researchers, about how online messages can be located, especially after deletion. Researchers should conduct similar site-specific investigations and develop practical guidelines and tools for improving the ethical use of online sources.

Introduction

Reddit is known as the “front page of the web,” claiming “52 M + daily active users” and “100K + communities” (Reddit, 2021 ). Millions of Redditors, including minors and other vulnerable populations, have thousands of subreddits to discuss extraordinarily specific and sometimes sensitive topics, including sexuality, health, violence, and drug use.

Given the public prominence, breadth, and depth of Reddit’s content, researchers use it as a data source. Proferes et al., ( 2021 ) identified 727 such studies published between 2010 and 2020-May. They found that only 2.5% of their studies claimed to paraphrase compared to the 28.5% of the studies that used exact quotes. Researchers who do paraphrase write of limiting the locatability of sources and possible consequent harm. (The studied reports are not quoted or cited directly, see the “Ethics” section below.) I am not aware of cases, fortunately, of online users coming to harm because of information in research reports. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened, and given the sensitivity of topics and vulnerability of sources, additional scrutiny could be consequential to users’ health, relationships, employment, and legal standing. (For a more general discussion of potential harm, sensitive topics, and sources, see Franzke et al., ( 2020 ), § 3.2.5.) Additionally, I note that users need not be personally identified to feel embarrassed, to be harassed, or to be forced to abandon a long-held pseudonym. And researchers themselves, whose use of public sources is thought to be outside of human subjects review, might face embarrassment or repercussions nonetheless if a source complains. Paraphrasing sources’ prose might mitigate such outcomes.

Verbatim quoting and paraphrasing are two practices within a spectrum of what Bruckman ( 2002 ) identified as disguise , which can range from none to heavy. Disguise can also include altering usernames and the context of a message, such as the time and forum of posting.

I analyze 22 Reddit research reports: 3 of light disguise, using verbatim quotes, and 19 of heavier disguise, claiming to reword phrases. I test if their sources can be located via three different search indexes (i.e., Google, Reddit, and RedditSearch). I was able to locate all of the verbatim sources (3/3) and many of the reworded sources (11/19). I also interview 10 of the reports’ authors about their sourcing practices, influences, and experiences. These conversations reveal that there is a lack of coherent practice and guidance on effective disguise, the importance of search and archival affordances, and how errors can arise amidst multi-author collaborations and during the review and revision process. Most importantly, these interviews identify exemplary practices, such as researchers testing their own disguises.

The present work does not address whether researchers should disguise their sources. This decision depends on the type of research, the sensitivity of the topic, the vulnerability of the sources, and the attributes of the venue. Rather, my concern is empirical: when researchers choose to employ disguise, does it work? And what, then, can we do to improve the practice?

Background and terminology

Reddit and sensitive topics.

Reddit was founded in June 2005 as a pseudonymous-friendly site for users to share and vote for links they had read (i.e., “I read it.”) Reddit’s development as a forum of forums, where users could trivially create subreddits, each with its. own moderators, led the website to succeed over its link-sharing peers.

Like Twitter and Wikipedia, Reddit serves an extraordinary corpus of mostly public data. That is, while there are private and quarantined subreddits, the vast majority of content is public : transparently accessible to any web browser or search engine. More so than Wikipedia and much of Twitter, Reddit hosts discussions of a personal character. Subreddits on sexuality, health (including mental health and eating disorders), interpersonal abuse and violence, and drug use and cessation have been topics of research. Reddit is a compelling and accessible venue, but with sensitive – even if public – information.

Ethics and Online Research

The practice of online research has been accompanied by discussion of how to do so ethically (Eysenbach & Till, 2001 ; Flicker et al., 2004 ; Mann & Stuart, 2000 ; Reid, 1996 ; Smith & Murray, 2001 ; Waskul & Douglas, 1996 ). And the issues noted by Siang ( 1999 ) over two decades ago remain salient today: of “the blurred distinction between public and private domains,” “the ease of anonymity or pseudonymity,” “the suspension of temporal barriers with the recording and archiving of communications,” and “the relatively low cost, easy to use, technological means to facilitate tracking of participants.”

An intuitive approach to these early concerns was to apply existing research guidelines to the online context, such as those from the American Psychological Association (King 1996 ) and other disciplinary and national societies. At the same time, the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) was constituted as a transdisciplinary endeavor, which created and maintains guidelines for online research (Ess & Committee 2002 ; Franzke et al., 2020 ).

Institutional review boards (IRBs) can also be a source of guidance and review. Like much of the disciplinary guidelines, however, their focus tends to be on human subjects research, where there is an interaction between researchers and subjects. Most Reddit research (86.1%) makes no mention of “IRB” or “ethics review.” Of those that do, the majority (77.2%) note an exempt status, though it’s unclear if this is “an official designation given by a review board or whether the authors made this judgment themselves” (Proferes et al., 2021 , p. 14).

What is clear is that there is no widely accepted and consistent practice when it comes to reporting excerpts of public content. Systemic literature reviews show this (Ayers et al., 2018 ; Proferes et al., 2021 ), as will the present work. For those concerned with disguising public data, there’s little guidance on how to do so effectively.

Online Sites, subjects, and sources

The incoherent approach to public data is related to a lack of agreement about terminology and substance. What should researchers call those whom they research online? I distinguish between subjects , those with whom researchers interact, and sources , authors of public content with whom researchers do not interact. (Recall that I use public to mean content that is transparently accessible to any web browser or search engine.) There is also the question of Reddit terminology. Following the architecture of Reddit, I distinguish between posts and their subsequent comments within a thread . I refer to posts and comments, generically, as messages .

Beyond terminology, what should researchers do? There is substantive disagreement compounded by different understandings of terms. Sharf ( 1999 , p. 253), for example, argued that researchers should contact public sources “in order to seek consent” and “implied consent should not be presumed if the writer does not respond.” Rodham & Gavin ( 2006 ) responded “that this is an unnecessarily extreme position to take” and wrote, “messages which are posted on such open forums are public acts, deliberately intended for public consumption.” Presently, I analyze published research reports and seek their sources, without consent. Unlike Sharf’s study of a breast cancer email list (“public” because the list is “open” for anyone to join), published reports are closer to Rodham and Gavin’s sense of the term (i.e., “intended for public consumption”).

Increasingly, researchers are engaging in site-specific considerations, which requires contextual ethical reasoning, be it at Wikipedia (Pentzold 2017 ), at sites where “we are studying people who deserve credit for their work” (Bruckman et al., 2015 ), or public sites where people, nonetheless, discuss sensitive topics or share images (Andalibi et al., 2017 ; Ayers et al., 2018 ; Chen et al., 2021 ; Dym & Fiesler, 2020 ; Haimson et al., 2016 ). For example, on Twitter, Fiesler & Proferes ( 2018 ) found that “few users were previously aware that their public tweets could be used by researchers, and the majority felt that researchers should not be able to use tweets without consent. However, we find that these attitudes are highly contextual, depending on factors such as how the research is conducted or disseminated, who is conducting it, and what the study is about.” Additionally, as I will show, specific websites have affordances that affect how sources can be located (e.g., novel search capabilities or external archives).

De-Identifying, Anonymizing, fabricating, and Disguising

Researchers who attempt disguise note that their sources might be struggling with health, sexuality, or drug use, and additional scrutiny might cause them harm. For the reasons that follow, I speak of disguising public sources to prevent them from being located .

Bruckman ( 2002 ) identified a spectrum of disguise, from none to heavy. Under light disguise, for example, “an outsider could probably figure out who is who with a little investigation.” The forum is named, usernames and other details are changed, yet “verbatim quotes may be used, even if they could be used to identify an individual.” Under heavy disguise , some false details are introduced and verbatim quotes are avoided if a “search mechanism could link those quotes to the person in question.” If the heavy disguise is successful, “someone deliberately seeking to find a subject’s identity would likely be unable to do so.” Moderate disguise is “a compromise position … incorporating some features of light disguise and some of heavy disguise, as appropriate to the situation.” Kozinets ( 2015 , p. 3473) adopted this notion in his discussion of ethical netnography though he used the term cloaking “to emphasize the researcher’s protective actions rather than the state of the participant.” This is a good point, but disguise is the more common term in the literature.

In commercial contexts, enterprises use sanitization to remove sensitive information such as “credit card numbers, email addresses and Social Security Number (SSN)” (Nguyen & Cavallari 2020 , pp. 37–38). In human subjects research, such as healthcare, de-identification “involves the removal of personally identifying information in order to protect personal privacy” (Guidelines for Data de-Identification or Anonymization, 2015). Anonymized is sometimes used synonymously with de-identified, or can have a stronger connotation of data being rendered incapable of being re-identified. I avoid anonymized because it is far too an assured word given the known cases of failure (Ohm 2010 ). And in public data contexts, there might not be personally identifiable information to speak of given the use of pseudonyms. Even so, users need not be personally identified to feel exposed or embarrassed, to be harassed, or to be forced to abandon a long-held pseudonym.

Introducing false or combined details about a source has been referred to as fabrication , a tactic of heavy disguise. The practice is not limited to prose and can include visual content, such as a profile picture in a screenshot (Haimson et al., 2016 ). This practice can conflict with traditional notions of research rigor and integrity. Markham ( 2012 ) argues that if done with care, fabrication can be the most ethical approach. If not done with care, however, fabrication can lead to suspicions of fraud (Singal, 2016 ).

UnGoogling has been used for “obscuring published data and analysis from index, search, and retrieval for ethical purposes” (Shklovski & Vertesi, 2013 , p. 2172). And obfuscating has been used to speak of the “deliberate addition of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection” (Brunton & Nissenbaum 2015 , p. 1). UnGoogling is too service-specific and is more often used to describe users removing themselves from the Google ecosystem, such as abandoning Android for iOS. Obfuscation ’s most common use is to describe users protecting their privacy rather than as a research practice.

I examine research reports who disguise their public sources to keep them from being located .

Locating sources

What of the substance, the process, of locating research subjects or sources? Sometimes the ethnographic subjects themselves, of a small town, for example, can recognize themselves and their neighbors. Sometimes real-world events, such as the occurrence of a murder, provide a clue to the public (Reyes, 2017 , n. 9; Singal, 2015 ). And when a researcher from a top-tier New England university describes their research using undergrads from a top-tier New England university, the subjects are probably their students. Online, messages’ prose style (Narayanan et al., 2012 ), timing (Johansson et al., 2015 ), and network relationships (Zhou et al., 2016 ) serve as digital fingerprints (Brown & Abramson, 2015 ), amendable to digital forensics (Guarino, 2013 ), which can lead to online accounts and even personal identities being linked together (Backes et al., 2016 ). For example, Narayanan & Shmatikov ( 2009 ) were able to re-identify a third of users in their “anonymous” Twitter graph who also had a Flickr account “with only a 12% error rate … even when the overlap between the target network and the adversary’s auxiliary information is small.”

As far back as the 1990s, King ( 1996 ) faulted Finn & Lavitt ( 1994 ) for disguising sources’ names, but not that of the sexual abuse forum or the date and time of posts. More recently, Zimmer ( 2010 ) critiqued researchers from a top-tier New England university for creating a “Tastes, Ties, and Time” Facebook dataset that was improperly – perhaps impossibly – “anonymized.” The data was obtained by Harvard Resident Advisors acting as research assistants and scraping their Facebook friends lists. And once the school and cohort were known, other aspects of students’ tastes, ties, and activity made re-identification possible (e.g., being the only student from a specific country in the dataset). Journalists, too, sometimes participate. At the New York Times , Barbaro & Zeller ( 2006 ) reported on – and confirmed – the potential to locate sources in an AOL dataset. A decade later, in the same newspaper, Singer ( 2015 ), wanting to speak to a source in a research study, was able to identify, contact, and interview the subject.

Concerned researchers have started to assess how often usernames, quotations, and media are included in research reports. Ayers et al., ( 2018 ) analyzed 112 health-related papers discussing Twitter and found 72% quoted a tweet, “of these, we identified at least one quoted account holder, representing 84%.” When usernames were disclosed, in 21% of the papers, all were trivially located. Ayers et al. wrote that these practices violate International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) ethics standards because (1) Twitter users might protect or delete messages after collection, and (2) revealing this information has no scientific value.

Proferes et al., ( 2021 ) performed a systematic overview of 727 research studies that used Reddit data and were published between 2010 and 2020-May. They found “Sixty eight manuscripts (9.4%) explicitly mentioned identifiable Reddit usernames in their paper and 659 (90.7%) did not. Two hundred and seven papers (28.5%) used direct quotes from users as part of their publications, 18 papers used paraphrased quotes, noting they were paraphrased (2.5%) and 502 (69.1%) did not include direct quotes” (Proferes et al., 2021 , p. 14).

I make no claim as to whether sources should be disguised. Rather, I ask if a researcher chooses disguise, does it work? Can the original message used by a researcher be located? If so, the full message, associated username, and context (i.e., subreddit, thread, and posting history) are then available. This, itself, could be revealing or linked with other information, including personally-identifying information.

I collected two sets of research reports. In 2020, I sought ethnographic-type research reports since 2015 that included Reddit messages. I searched via Google using keywords such as “AoIR guidelines,” “privacy,” “verbatim,” and “fabrication.” I found three reports using light-disguise with verbatim phrases and three claiming heavier disguise with reworded phrases. In 2021, as part of a panel proposal, I discussed this work with two of the authors of a systematic review of Reddit (Proferes et al., 2021 ), and they kindly shared their list of reports that “paraphrased” Reddit messages, adding 16 new reports to my initial set. Because paraphrase can connote significant change, I use the term reword , which can be as minimal as inserting an adjective or altering a place or name. The final corpus, then, included 22 reports, with 19 claiming to reword.

From each report, I collected phrases of more than ten words because any less than that is too short for meaningful searches. I excluded phrases from subreddit documentation such as sidebars, wikis, or FAQs; these have multiple authors and are informative rather than personal disclosures.

The process of locating Redditors’ original messages was idiosyncratic: intensive, manual, and subjective. I performed exact searches (using quotation marks) and inexact searches across the whole phrase and fragments of novel-seeming prose. Near the end of this work, and hoping to share a method of scrambling phrases and testing disguises, I wrote a script that automated the invocation and opening of search query results (Reagle & Gaur 2022 ). Even so, I had to use discretion with how many search results to review, usually no more than the first page or 20 results – each search service returns results differently. I made no effort to personally identify Reddit users. However, locating sources, as I attempted, could be the first step in the distinct process of identifying users.

After my initial analysis, I emailed the research reports’ authors and asked if they would speak with me. If so, and they completed the consent form, I began with five questions about their practice, rationale, influences, and thoughts about my efforts. We worked to identify weaknesses to avoid and strengths to emulate as part of research and publication. One interview was a ~ 30-minute voice communication, others were via email exchanges with each subject. Interviewees were allowed to review my characterization of their work and our discussion in this report.

Though I used public research reports and their own Reddit sources in my analysis, they are not identified, cited, or quoted. I wanted candid interviews with researchers free of possible embarrassment. I hope that “someone deliberately seeking to find a [subject’s or source’s] identity would likely be unable to do so” (Bruckman 2002 ). That said, other Reddit researchers who are conversant with the literature could make guesses about the identity of research sources. Should this happen, I believe my sources have plausible deniability.

This method was specified as part of Institutional Review Board application #20-08-30 and “approved” as DHHS Review Category #2: “Exempt… No further action or IRB oversight is required as long as the project remains the same.”

Analysis and discussion

Table  1 describes the reports’ approaches to phrases, number of sources, and how many were located. The rightmost column has strengths (bold Ⓢ) to emulate and weaknesses (Ⓦ) to avoid in creating effective disguise relative to reports’ stated policy, actual practice, and ease of location. Importantly, all reports articulated a policy of disguise in their approach to sources, even if weak (i.e., removed usernames but included verbatim quotes).

Research reports and results (“i” = interview)

Searching reddit and the meaning of deletion

Authors V1 and V2 both relied on the fact that Redditors are typically pseudonymous. They included verbatim quotes without the authors’ usernames (i.e., light disguise).

V2 claimed that because pseudonyms are encouraged, the quoted Redditors could not be traced. This claim is highly probable, but digital forensics can sometimes link pseudonyms with other identities, especially as it is easy to peruse all of a user’s posts. Additionally, users who maintain multiple accounts can mistakenly post a message with the wrong account. Even though such users can edit or delete mistaken messages, it’s likely the original will survive elsewhere.

V1 was more cognizant of these concerns and stated they only used posts wherein Redditors explicitly declared they were using a throwaway (single-use) account. However, oddly, V1 did include verbatim quotes from a few Redditors who wrote why they chose not to use a throwaway . A researcher might inadvertently collect posts with the term “throwaway” even if the Redditor was explaining why they did not do so.

The research reports of V1 and V2 each had about twenty phrases (of ten or more words), and I was able to locate almost all of them using three indexes of Reddit content.

Table  2 represents the relative usefulness of the three search services across all 22 research reports. Oddly, Google under-performed (“†”) in verbatim searches because it did not return any of V1’s 18 sources from Reddit. Google’s search algorithms are opaque and ever-changing, so I do not know why it missed these posts, but they could become locatable in the future. Indeed, much could change, and search engines’ capabilities are likely to improve. When removing V1 from the calculation, Google’s verbatim rate is 45%.

Percent of sources found (non-exclusively) at service

RedditSearch (using the Pushshift service) was the most generative search engine because it permits accurate time and subreddit searches. In practice, winnowing away misses is as important as roughly matching hits. It also returned some posts that had since been deleted by their authors, including from V1’s users who did not use throwaways – and perhaps regretted that decision and deleted their posts. Similarly, I was able to locate phrases from deleted posts in the reports of V1, R6, R14, and R18.

The deletion of messages by Redditors suggests that users can feel exposed even when using pseudonymous or throwaway accounts. Users should appreciate that deleted messages on Reddit can be archived and indexed off-site. Researchers should appreciate that they could inadvertently publicize such messages.

Additionally, the Pushshift data originally contained public and private subreddits (determined by moderators) and can include quarantined subreddits (determined by Reddit for problematic but not yet banned) (Stuck_In_the_Matrix, 2019 , 2015 ). Pushshift data has also been packaged in common “big data” frameworks, permitting even more powerful queries and analysis. For example, BigQuery (Balamuta, 2018 ) was used by R5, R6, and R17; ConvoKit ( 2018 ) was used by R9. Locating sources via these resources would add additional capabilities beyond the human-facing searching engines I limited myself to.

Making mistakes and the need for a system

V3 argued that because the site is premised on Redditors competing for upvoted visibility, the site can be taken as public. Even so, V3 elided all usernames, except for two central characters in their report. They quoted phrases from a couple of posts and a handful of comments. This made it easy to find their sources. I was also able to (redundantly) find a post by looking for V3’s description of a meme via a Google image search.

Upon reading V3’s report I was confused by the positioning of Redditors as authors deserving credit in a public venue (hence no consent was obtained), yet, also of a need to elide most Redditors’ usernames (while quoting their prose verbatim). V3 responded that the approach to sources and its description changed during the reports’ review and editing: “originally each of the pseudonyms was formally cited, but this was removed in an earlier stage of peer review.” The confusion in the description was the likely result of this change “and not picked up during the copy-editing stage of the journal.”

R12 also reflected on the likely cause of mistakenly including verbatim phrases. Because of the massive size of their data, “we only paraphrase those we would actually use in the paper.” The process of managing the manuscript and sources then became a problem: “We initially inserted the original quotes into the draft and did one round of paraphrasing. But writing was an iterative process, especially when review & resubmit was involved, during which we might switch in and out quotes as appropriate.” Having multiple authors work on this no doubt contributed: “We probably thought one person on the research team did the paraphrasing.”

Similarly, R16 intended to change all the quotes and believed they had: “I obviously didn’t do a thorough job at it, and I don’t know why – was I aiming to keep the authenticity of the quotes, or was I simply running out of time and did not work diligently? Probably both.” Ethical disguise had been at the forefront of their mind at the start, but perhaps not later: “Was I weighing up the risk of [sources] being identified in this context of technologies used by parents? Certainly in my ethics application, but probably not as much in the reporting.” R5, R6, R10, and R19 similarly included verbatim phrases contrary to their stated policy, perhaps because of similar reasons as the researchers above.

Balancing Fidelity and disguise

Many of the interviewees spoke of the challenge of balancing fidelity to sources’ sentiments with the ethical concern of limiting sources’ exposure.

With respect to identities, V3 shared that “The intention here was to not explicitly name Redditors (using their pseudonym) unless there was a reason to do so.” That is, “My ethical practice defaulted to anonymity, but when necessary for the discussion I used the pseudonyms that the user provides to the public forum.” Two prominent Redditors “are named because of how identifiable their content is and how widely it has been shared across platforms (including sites such as KnowYourMeme).” Additionally, one “username itself was worthy of comment as a signifier of geek humor.” And, once published, the “study gave them significant appreciated notoriety on Reddit and beyond,” something they welcomed.

With respect to verbatim phrases, V3 recognized that phrases can be searched for. However, “What you can find this way is a user’s publicly available (shared) content and pseudonym, not their ‘real name’.” In any case, “As researchers we understand that ethics is a process, not something that is achieved once it is rubberstamped by an institution.” As part of V3’s process, “I considered the trade-off between potential tracking back to a pseudonym and fair representation. The expectation of users, popularity of content, and lack of real names also fed into this calculation.”

R2 attempted to disguise sources and this was a shift in practice from earlier work, where they “included the usernames and preserved quotations.” The earlier work had been influenced by an AoIR presentation about a site wherein the Redditors saw themselves as creative developers worthy of and preferring attribution. “And, because I believed part of my argument about Reddit hinged on the creative play that Redditors engaged in, I wanted to preserve usernames (as this is one of the places where this kind of play occurred).” However, “given the nature of the online sphere these days (this was pre-Gamergate), I would likely not have made the same choice.”

Additionally, the “AOIR guidelines have been hugely influential” in R2’s practice. The guidelines respect that research practices “are not one-and-done decisions, but that things like anonymizing [online] identities/quotes are ongoing decisions that we need to make. IRB guidelines are pretty much worthless in this regard, as they would consider any public forum ‘public’ and their understanding of how easy it is to find out information based on usernames or quotes is limited in my experience.”

The AoIR guidelines were influential to R3, R16, and R18 as well. Other noted influences included boyd ( 2007 ), Kozinets ( 2015 ), and especially Markham ( 2012 ).

Changing practice and changing context

Unlike R2’s past work, in their present report, usernames were elided and phrases from posts and comments were lightly reworded. Though Google can be astoundingly good at finding similar phrases when the field is sufficiently narrow, the modest rewording was sufficient to frustrate my efforts with Reddit, Google, and RedditSearch. However, those messages appeared in threads whose titles were included verbatim in the report, and this leaked information was useful in locating sources. Once in the right thread, it was trivial to locate phrases from the report. Not only did verbatim titles become avenues for locating messages, but they can also be sensitive disclosures.

Like V3, R2 changed their level of disguise during the report’s review: “This piece was a content analysis, and so in my first draft of the article I actually preserved this material as-is, because I wanted to be transparent and make my study potentially replicable.” However, reviewers found this to be problematic because it could open the Redditors to trolling. R2’s forums were not sensitive per se : “I would absolutely have issues with someone using usernames/direct quotes from a health or relationship subreddit for obvious reasons.” Yet, personal disclosures were made in the studied forums and its users are sometimes targets of harassment. R2 agreed with the concern and altered the quoted phrases: “the outlet and the reviewers made a difference in this case.”

R2’s experiences speak to the importance of site-specific context and the larger zeitgeist. A practice on one subreddit might not be appropriate to another, especially after larger events increase the likelihood of trolling and harassment. Similarly, R15 noted that “I think ethical use of social media posts for research has to take context into consideration – it’s a different thing to quote someone posting from a public Twitter account than it is to burrow into an obscure subreddit and identify one comment on a long thread to surface.” And the social media context is dynamic: “With more and more news-style platforms grabbing social media posts without permission to use as comments in news articles we might even see a shifting culture around what people think is permissible once they’ve posted something publicly. Or this practice might result in pushback in which people demand to be asked permission or credited for their posts!”

The world that researchers seek to understand is ever-changing, as are the technical affordances of media platforms and search services. It can be difficult to match ethical policy to the quickly shifting online world, as can implementing that policy with consistent practice, especially given the time and changes needed during a reports’ publication.

Effective tactics of disguise

R1’s report is a detailed ethnography of a few identified subreddits that is well-grounded with descriptions of community concerns and quotes from Redditors. Yet there were only two phrases (of more than 10 words) to attempt to locate. Most of everything else was from subreddits’ documentation (not sensitive) and interviews (not indexed by search engines). Confidential interviews of public Redditors can enable a surprising degree of richness, disclosure, and confidentiality.

Otherwise, searching for 150 + sources in the 22 research papers reveals that the metaphor of finding a needle in a haystack (of returned search results) is apt. Reports that focus on a single subreddit (as stated or inferred) in a single year winnow away much of the hay. Additionally, changes of punctuation, switching to or from contractions, single word insertions or removals, and retaining novel words are usually insufficient disguise.

Larger datasets – or less specific descriptions – and more substantive changes are more effective. R9, for example, included 11 effectively disguised phrases. Their dataset included over a million posts over a dozen subreddits – their haystack was large. Additionally, their technique for disguising the phrases might be an effective consequence of an analytic technique used to normalize text into a canonical form: “normalization is an approach to finding long English phrases in online vernacular and replace them with concepts in clinical knowledge sources. For instance, ‘shortness of breath’ in a post is replaced by the term ‘edema’ or ‘dyspnea.’”. Though this technique was not created to disguise sources, it seemingly serves that purpose.

The rigor of testing and disciplinary differences

R3 used about ten reworded phrases from Reddit; I was not able to locate their sources.

Two influences at the start of R3’s career – as well as the sensitive topics they tend to study – led to a rigorous process for disguising sources. Today, their process is an iterative one, of swapping in synonyms or larger rephrasing “in a way that doesn’t change the meaning and yet would be untraceable. If someone were to put that quote in Google and try to find it there … they wouldn’t be able to do that.” To accomplish this, R3 performs the task themselves. That is, they seek to locate their own disguised sources – though, as seen above, Google is not the only index of Reddit messages. And their method is akin to my method here: using exact searches (in quote marks), near searches (without quote marks), and focusing on portions of a phrase, while conceding the process is “pretty subjective.” Just as with my method, they have to choose how to specify the search and how many returned results to review.

R3’s germinal influences were an event and a scholar. First, as a doctoral student, they saw another researcher’s source publicly disclosed because of the inclusion of a verbatim quotation. This was “an example of how [verbatim quotes] can be a problem.” Second, subsequently, R3 learned of Markham ( 2012 )’s coining and explication of “ethical fabrication,” giving R3 a name and rationale for something similar to what R3 was already doing.

Today, in their role as an editor and reviewer, R3 sometimes asks researchers to reflect on their sourcing practice and rationale, with those in their discipline tending to be thoughtful about this issue. Elsewhere, though, R3 has experienced pushback against fabrication, such as in a presentation before a group of network-analytic sociologists. The audience was upset when they learned they were seeing fabricated, rather than authentic, quotes and images in the presentation.

R4 employed similar tactics as R3, changing “gender, location, specific details of an incident etc. so that, while they convey the original thought of the author, they cannot be traced back to them.” They tested these disguised phrases using a Pushshift-related service and “shared the two snippets with others in the team in order to see if the rephrase is too far off.”

R14 was the third interviewee to test their disguises. Though R14 used Pushshift in other work, they did not test their disguises against RedditSearch/Pushshift. Instead, they pursued the tactic of change-and-test “until I couldn’t find the quote + reddit in Google.” I was able to locate many of their sources because I limited my queries to the Reddit website (i.e., site:reddit.com) in Google. This extra specificity plus the year led to many of R14’s sources.

R16, too, has tested their disguises in the past via Google, “but I don’t know if I did it with this paper. And I certainly did not try other search engines.”

If a researcher wants to use disguised public data, rather than interviews, then the best disguise is tested disguise. This means investigating where their data sources are likely to be archived, how it all can be searched, and using as many facets of search as possible to test their efforts.

Limitations and Future Work

The present work is idiosyncratic and relatively small in scale; nonetheless, it shows that the practice of disguise is often haphazard and ineffective. The next step is to investigate automated methods for managing and disguising sources. That is, can automated programs and services alter phrases for inclusion in reports with more or less efficacy than humans? Managing sources could be easy as keeping quotes, their source, and their disguise in a spreadsheet shared among collaborators – and this could then facilitate automatic testing. The next phase of the current work tests the feasibility and efficacy of this approach (Reagle & Gaur, 2022 ) .

The web and the services that index it are dynamic. Google routinely updates its search algorithms, and in April of 2022 – after the data and collection in the present report – Reddit announced they had extended their search facility to comments and made their searches less literal: “100% of a query doesn’t have to match the text of a post to return relevant results. By doing this we saw a 60% increase in results for queries that previously didn’t receive results” (Staff, 2022 ). Such changes will affect how easy it is to locate a source. Though such changes could make location more difficult by crowding out the true source, it is clearly the intention of services to improve their search efficacy.

Another practical follow-up is to increase the understanding of risks and options among researchers. King ( 1996 ) faulted Finn & Lavitt ( 1994 ) for leaking information about source context decades ago, and yet it still happens. A guide that builds on Bruckman ( 2002 )’s categories of disguise and identifies risks and options available to the researcher could help authors, reviewers, and editors. The guide could include a checklist of things to attend to for a given category of risk and disguise. And it could be complemented by site-specific information about conventions and norms, and affordances around user identity and message persistence and locatability.

Finally, messages appeared in research reports that were subsequently deleted by their authors – even if from pseudonymous and throw-away accounts. This merits more attention and work-in-progress indicates throwaway accounts regularly – routinely even – delete posts in advice subreddits.

Conclusions

There is no single research policy appropriate to disguising online sources. For example, community members might expect or appreciate recognition as creative authors. Like V3’s two Redditors who gained additional notice for appearing in her report, R18 noted that “One of the moderators of a subreddit I used reached out to me on ResearchGate and thanked me for my research and steps toward harm reduction; they were happy that I used material from their subreddit.”

If researchers chose to use disguise, however, their practice ought to effectively match their policy. I found descriptions of ethical policy that were confusing or inconsistent with actual practice. In a few cases, this was the result of changes made during the review and editing process. In another case, I suspect it was an oversight in data collecting and reporting. Many others simply made mistakes or failed to appreciate the affordances of Reddit and web searching.

The RedditSearch interface to the Pushshift repository proved especially useful in locating sources. And such data can be repackaged in ways that permit even more powerful searching capabilities (e.g., BigQuery and ConvoKit). While some researchers might use these resources in large-scale analyses, other researchers were unfamiliar with them. In addition to advanced search capabilities, these resources also mean that researchers who use them might include data since deleted by users in research analyses and reports.

The highest level of disguise, eliding usernames and rewording prose, can be effective, especially when the reworded phrases are tested against search engines – the practice of a few interviewed researchers. However, concerned researchers should be as specific as possible in their test queries, taking advantage of site, date, and subreddit facets.

My interviewees shared how their practices changed relative to their research sites, the larger cultural context, and their influences and experiences. The different approaches we see in reports, however, are not necessarily the result of a consistent policy (i.e., from conception to publication), fully cognizant of technical affordances (e.g., Google’s site: facet and RedditSearch/Pushshift existence and abilities), and users’ wishes (e.g., when users delete posts from throw-away accounts). The research community can improve on this, though, via similar site-specific investigations and practical guidelines that inform the conception, execution, and review of research. We also need additional work on automating, managing, and testing research disguise.

Acknowledgements

I thank the other panelists of the AoIR 2021 panel on Reddit and ethics, especially Michael Zimmer (Marquette University) and Nicholas Proferes (Arizona State University), who shared information with me about their large-scale survey of Reddit research. I thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful insights and suggestions. Finally, I am grateful to my interviewees, especially as their attention and time were under stress from COVID-19.

Availability of data and material (data transparency)

Code availability (software application or custom code), declarations.

Northeastern Univervisty Institutional Review Board application #20-08-30 and “approved” as DHHS Review Category #2: “Exempt… No further action or IRB oversight is required as long as the project remains the same.”

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Social Media Research

• Considerations when researching social media
• Collected tools
• Additional resources

Reddit TOS and API

• Reddit's TOS The Reddit TOS is more permissive of research use than Meta's platforms, partially by omission. It does not directly address research on Reddit, but it does allow for automated capturing of posts via the API.
• Reddit's API documentation The Reddit API exposes most of the site's content to automated collection. Some rules are linked on this page as well, which are fairly straightforward and permissive to research uses.

Reddit's TOS and API rules do not contain the sort of blanket bans on automated data collection that Meta's TOSes do, but they do not contain any specific provisions for research use either. Like Twitter, the API helps collect posts as they happen rather than archiving all posts on the site.

Tools for Reddit research

• Netlytic Netlytic is a browser-based social media research tool that has text mining and network visualization features. Works with Twitter, YouTube, RSS feeds, and Reddit. Free accounts are sufficient for most student purposes. Netlytic has a YouTube channel with demonstrations for a variety of types of project.
• Mozdeh Mozdeh is a social media quantitative analysis FOSS software that can also collect tweets, like Netlytic or Chorus. It works with the same things as Netlyltic: Tweets, YouTube comments, Reddit comments, and manually imported data. Unlike Netlytic, it is a desktop app. It also has a YouTube channel where you can find guides to collecting and analyzing data.
• Reaper Reaper, built on the socialreaper Python library, is a desktop app with no coding required. While it calls what it does "scraping", it makes use of site APIs and the user will need to register for an API key for any site they want to use Reaper on. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Tumblr, and Pinterest. It outputs all data as .csv tabular files.
• PRAW: the Python Reddit API Wrapper PRAW is a Python library for working with the Reddit API.
• 4CAT 4CAT is a relatively advanced tool for the collection and analysis of social media data - it's best run on a UNIX server and has dependencies that it does not automatically install itself - but with the upside that it has modules built to work with important but niche platforms like 4chan, 8kun, Parler, and more, as well as Twitter and Reddit.
• pushshift.io Pushshift is a popular wrapper for the Reddit API used with the requests package in Python. Documentation on pushshift.io is there, but tutorials must be found elsewhere.
• Here's one tutorial on how to use the pushshift.io wrapper in Python.

Example publications in Reddit research

• Using Data from Reddit, Public Deliberation, and Surveys to Measure Public Opinion about Autonomous Vehicles ABSTRACT: When and how can researchers synthesize survey data with analyses of social media content to study public opinion, and when and how can social media data complement surveys to better inform researchers and policymakers? This paper explores how public opinions might differ between survey and social media platforms in terms of content and audience, focusing on the test case of opinions about autonomous vehicles. more... less... The paper first extends previous overviews comparing surveys and social media as measurement tools to include a broader range of survey types, including surveys that result from public deliberation, considering the dialogic characteristics of different social media, and the range of issue publics and marginalized voices that different surveys and social media forums can attract. It then compares findings and implications from analyses of public opinion about autonomous vehicles from traditional surveys, results of public deliberation, and analyses of Reddit posts, applying a newly developed computational text analysis tool. Findings demonstrate that social media analyses can both help researchers learn more about issues that are uncovered by surveys and also uncover opinions from subpopulations with specialized knowledge and unique orientations toward a subject. In light of these findings, we point to future directions on how researchers and policymakers can synthesize survey and social media data, and the corresponding data integration techniques, to study public opinion.
• Studying Reddit: A Systematic Overview of Disciplines, Approaches, Methods, and Ethics ABSTRACT: This article offers a systematic analysis of 727 manuscripts that used Reddit as a data source, published between 2010 and 2020. Our analysis reveals the increasing growth in use of Reddit as a data source, the range of disciplines this research is occurring in, how researchers are getting access to Reddit data, the characteristics of the datasets researchers are using, the subreddits and topics being studied, the kinds of analysis and methods researchers are engaging in, and the emerging ethical questions of research in this space. more... less... We discuss how researchers need to consider the impact of Reddit’s algorithms, affordances, and generalizability of the scientific knowledge produced using Reddit data, as well as the potential ethical dimensions of research that draws data from subreddits with potentially sensitive populations.
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• Last Updated: Sep 4, 2024 3:31 PM
• URL: https://subjectguides.library.american.edu/socialmediaresearch

How to Use Reddit for Fast (and Accurate) Market Research

Reddit allows you to observe what people really think about your products so you create better marketing campaigns and content.

With 50,000 niche communities and 250 million unique monthly visitors , Reddit is packed with potential customers talking about brands and products.

Bonus: Download a free guide that reveals how to increase social media engagement with better audience research, sharper customer targeting, and Hootsuite’s easy-to-use social media software.

Reddit 101 ( skip this section if you already use Reddit)

Like Snapchat, Reddit is confusing to people who don’t use it. Here’s a quick intro to Reddit.

Most people use Reddit to waste time. By subscribing to popular communities (called subreddits), you’ll get an endless firehose of viral content. These communities are divided by themes such as science topics, news, hobbies, and Reddit inventions such as the “Ask Reddit” format, where the community answers questions.

Casual Reddit users will often join a specific subreddit related to their passion or profession. For example, a music lover might subscribe to a subreddit about learning guitar. Here, the content is less frequent and not viral. It’s simply people talking to each other and sharing things. Vendors who try to post here will often be mocked or kicked out.

Dedicated Reddit users will join communities that appear confusing to an outsider. These users are more interested in conversations rather than content. For example, someone might post a funny link but the main attraction will be the funny and witty dialogue between different users. These conversations will often be self-referential to moments in Reddit’s history or obscure memes. This makes it hard to follow and understand why certain things are popular on Reddit until you regularly read these threads.

Subreddits = niche communities often related to specific interests. Some subreddits attract millions of monthly views; others attract a tiny group of dedicated people.

Reddit gold = Users will “gift” each other a premium subscription to Reddit if they think a comment is particularly funny or valuable to the community.

Karma = This is a Reddit point system that rewards users who contribute to the community. If you submit a link that other users appreciate, you’ll gain points.

Downvote/upvote = This is the golden economy that keeps Reddit valuable. In most social media sites, a lot of garbage content floats to the top of the feed. In Reddit, users quickly downvote or upvote content. For example, let’s say Reddit users are having a discussion about Pepsi. If a brand manager comes in and posts a link to a new Pepsi contest, users will likely downvote that post, pushing it to the bottom. If a user says something smart or funny, it will gain upvotes.

This system ensures that interesting content stays at the top and spam sinks to the bottom. Your post score is balanced by downvotes and upvotes. For example, if 10 people downvote my post and 11 people upvote my post, I’d have a score of 1. This ensures that every post has a fair chance of rising or falling based on the community’s votes.

Throwaway account = This is a popular phrase you’ll hear on Reddit. Reddit users are talented internet sleuths. If you post something and it attracts attention, Reddit users will look at your comment history and expose your personal information. That’s why most Reddit users will create a temporary ‘throwaway’ account they’ll use to post a comment and then never use again.

Using Reddit to conduct market research: A step-by-step guide

Step #1: find where your customers are hiding, find the right subreddit.

To start, find a subreddit filled with your target customers. There’s no magic solution here. It can take a bit of work to find the right communities. Begin by searching for subreddits . You can also use the following search operators to get started: title:keyword (example, title:Honda), subreddit:keyword (example, subreddit:Honda); and URL:keyword (example, URL:Hondafans.com).

Install the free Reddit Enhancement suite

This free tool adds advanced searching and filtering options to Reddit. With this tool, you can filter irrelevant subreddits, keywords, and old posts. This done by using custom filters. It’s a helpful tool.

Do some sleuthing

Now, spend an hour or so doing some keyword searches. Make a list of the popular subreddits for your topic and common questions that people ask. For example, let’s say I’m a brand manager at Honda. With a little searching, I’ll bump into these subreddits: r/PreludeOwners , r/Honda_XR_and_XL , and r/Honda . These have valuable conversations about Honda’s brand and products, offering an authentic glimpse into the lives of Honda customers.

Step #2: Ask these questions

During your research, focus on answering the four questions below.

How do people feel about your product category? It’s easy to forget that the public has much different experiences than we do inside the walls of a marketing department. Reddit is amazing for revealing unfiltered opinions about brands, products, industries, and categories.

How do people feel about advertising in your category? On the top of Reddit, you’ll see eight tabs. Use the ‘‘promoted” tab to see advertising campaigns run by your competitors. Did any of your competitors promote their products to this community? Look at the comments to see how consumers responded—and what they feel about advertising campaigns in your category. Do competitors brag too much? Are certain features considered table stakes now?

How sophisticated are consumers of your products? Consumers get good at buying products—what differentiates you today is expected tomorrow. For example, at Hootsuite we’ve been helping companies track and prove the ROI of social media for many years. But each year, the topic morphs as our industry becomes more sophisticated.

Reddit can help you stay ahead of your customer’s demand—whether that be the features that bore them, the promises they’re tired of hearing, or the things they wish brands would get right.

Go to the top of the subreddit you want to analyze and select the tab called “gilded.” This will sort by comments that received Reddit gold. As mentioned, Reddit users will gift each other “gold” (which means they pay for the user’s upgrade to Reddit premium) for comments that are exceptionally valuable, funny, or insightful. These are comments that have resonated with Reddit’s most discerning users. Use these “gilded” comments to better understand the sophistication level of your audience as these comments are the smartest or funniest perspectives in the community.

Who is the HXC customer? Unlike most social networks, Reddit pushes the smartest comments and most discerning consumer opinions to the top. It’s a social network filled with smart and opinionated consumers. This is exactly the consumer you want to aim your marketing strategy at.

Most marketing makes the mistake of talking to the lowest common denominator (“meet Joe, your typical male person, looking for a simple way to file taxes online so that he can get back to what he really loves: watching sports with his buds”). But when you’re searching for a new Honda, you ask your friend, the car lover who knows everything about Hondas. Or when you’re looking for a mutual fund to buy, you ask your investment friend who lives on a yacht. These people have specific opinions and expectations for products—and other consumers idealize them.

This is the concept of the HXC customer developed by Julie Supan . According to Supan, if you aim your products and marketing at the most discerning customer, the masses will follow. Reddit can help you better understand these discerning customers.

The best subreddits for marketers

You’ll find subreddits for most industries and products. A relevant subreddit for this post is www.reddit.com/r/SampleSize/ , a community of market researchers.

Another good one that I follow is www.reddit.com/r/AskMarketing/ , a subreddit where marketing professionals ask for answers to hard questions like Facebook ad optimization techniques, tracking the ROI of event marketing, and asking advice about new business ventures.

Step #3: Analyze and monitor

By now, you should have a good idea of the subreddits and typical questions customers ask on Reddit. In this last section, I’ll show you how to monitor these communities for new conversations.

Combine subreddits together

With Reddit, you can create a multireddit. This allows you to group individual subreddits on a page, making it easy to scan and read new content.

The easiest way to create a multireddit is by logging into Reddit. Then press “create,” located on the left side of the page under multireddits. You can also combine subreddits into a URL like so: www.reddit.com/r/subreddit+subreddit . For example, I created the following multireddit, combining three of the best marketing subreddits into one: www.reddit.com/r/askmarketing+marketing+SampleSize+entreprenuer . Bookmark that URL and you’ll always have new marketing tips from the Reddit community.

Monitor for keywords with this app

I’ve tried a few different ways to automatically pull posts from Reddit including web scraping scripts . These often break, though. One of the tools I love to use is the Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro app for Hootsuite . You can monitor brand terms or keywords for any topic, pulling all these hyper-targeted conversations right into your Hootsuite dashboard.

I’m not only recommending this app because I work at Hootsuite. I actually use the app. I even use it to monitor conversations about music recording gear (a hobby of mine) as it pulls interesting bits from all around Reddit.

Add the Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro app to your Hootsuite dashboard

Install the Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro app . Next, go to your Hootsuite dashboard (if you don’t have one, you can start with a free account ). Click Add a New Stream. In the window, select Apps and then select the Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro app.

Start listening! Go to the Hootsuite stream you just created

Click on the tiny gear icon in the corner of the Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro app. Enter a few keywords you’d like to monitor. For example, I’m interested in what customers think about Hootsuite. So I monitor: “love Hootsuite,” “Hootsuite,” and “buy Hootsuite?” These conversations appear right inside my Hootsuite dashboard, so I don’t have to check Reddit for new posts.

I use these insights for market research but this type of listening is critical for brand managers as well. Reddit can be an early warning system for an impending brand PR crisis and monitoring conversations saves you from having to check for new mentions of your company or products.

Use RSS to bring the conversation to you

You can use RSS feeds to monitor different subreddits as well. RSS doesn’t seem to work on all subreddits. But you can try your luck with Hootsuite’s RSS tool (same process as step 3) or learn more about RSS in this guide to Reddit RSS subscriptions . Written by a Reddit user of course.

That’s how I use Reddit for market research.

If you’re looking for other ways to use social data in your marketing plans, check out our free guide, The Social Media Data Cookbook . You’ll learn 11 simple recipes to help you put social data to work including a simple test you can run to see the exact ROI of social messages.

Read it for Free

Become a better social marketer.

Get expert social media advice delivered straight to your inbox.

James is a senior copywriter and content strategist on Hootsuite's brand team. Before Hootsuite, he worked at a few ad agencies creating B2B campaigns for Google, Intuit, Thomson Reuters, AppLovin (a mobile ad company acquired for 1.2 billion), and Wealthfront. James enjoys B2B content marketing, the refreshing taste of Wolf Cola, and writing music.

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How-To Geek

How to search reddit more effectively.

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Chrome is top dog, but firefox is still my favorite browser, why it feels like ads are listening to your conversations (when they aren't), quick links, why you should search reddit, how to use reddit's on-site search more effectively, get better reddit search results with google.

Many people are adding "reddit" when searching on Google and other web search engines to get relevant results off the giant news aggregation and discussion site. There's a better way to search both on and off Reddit, however.

If you're a long-time Reddit user or simply just somebody who lurks about and finds content on the site useful, you're already familiar with why someone might want to search Reddit.

If you're less familiar with the site, you might be a bit confused as to why people are including Reddit in their search queries.

The answer, broadly, is that Reddit is essentially a fusion of a wide variety of internet resources. It's like a combination of social media and the BBS/Usenet/forum discussions that used to be prevalent in the early days of the internet (except all fused together into one mega directory). It's an absolutely massive platform that includes discussion focused on everything from breaking news to incredible niche hobbies.

Don't get us wrong: There is a lot of dumb (and even awful/objectionable) content on Reddit, but there's also home to a huge amount of helpful user-generated content.

From identifying what plants are growing in the flower beds of your new home to figuring out what the obscure error code your 3D printer is throwing out means, there's a good chance you can use Reddit to do it.

In fact, the habit of leaning on Reddit for organic human-driven answers has become so widespread that people have taken to appending their Google search results with the word "reddit" to help filter regular Google search results.

It's so widespread that, as Boing Boing Editor Rob Beschizza highlighted , the "reddit" search term has even percolated into the "People also ask" Google search results. We were able to replicate the same result, seen in the screenshot below.

Clearly, there are a lot of people searching Reddit to get answers to their questions. So let's take a look at how to search Reddit because digging through the millions of subreddits and the billions of comments to drill down to the information you actually want is crucial if you want to actually find useful information.

First, we'll look at how to use the recently-improved on-site Reddit search, and then we'll look at how to leverage Google to wade through all those billions of comments.

Historically, however, searching Reddit was a bit of a hassle. The on-site Reddit search engine was abysmal. For years and years it was so terrible it was borderline useless and amounted, more or less, to just blanket searching the entire site like you were scanning through a massive text file with the find command.

If you searched for something straightforward like "stretches for back pain" it was a total crapshoot whether you'd get useful results from a physical therapy subreddit or nonsensical results from a fan-fiction horror subreddit.

In fact, it was so bad, if not for the recent changes Reddit rolled out in April 2022 updating the search algorithm and including features like comment searching, we wouldn't even bother with this section.

There are still a lot of reasons to prefer a proper search engine like Google over the native Reddit search, but knowing how to use the search on Reddit boosts your chances of finding useful information.

One of the primary benefits you get from searching directly on Reddit, for instance, is the ability to sort the search results by Reddit-based metrics like how many comments the post has, how new it is, number of upvotes (Reddit's community-based approval system), and the ability to easily limit the time frame.

While you can replicate some of those search customizations in a regular search engine you can't replicate them all, and it's much faster to use Reddit's native interface to flip between them.

In addition to using the GUI elements to change up how you're sorting the results and what time frame you're using, you can also use filters in the actual search box to rapidly narrow the scope of your search.

Here are the available filters. Every one of them is used directly in the search box and without a space between the filter and the parameter. Each entry below is an example, simply swap out the text after the colon for whatever parameter you want to use. Enclose multiple words in quotations.

•   author :GovSchwarzenegger -- Filters by username. In this case, it will limit your search to just those made by Arnold Schwarzenegger's Reddit account.
•   flair :Biology -- Filters by subreddit "flair." Flair, in this context, is something set individually by moderators of subreddits to help organize that subreddit. The /r/Science subreddit uses the "Biology" flair, for example, and the /r/BuildaPC subreddit has various flairs like "Build Help." This search parameter is only super useful if you're searching in a specific subreddit and want to filter to just show posts with that flair.
•   self : true -- Filters to show only "self" posts (posts made by an individual, not posts made by sharing a link to an outside source like a news article). Useful if you want to filter out discussion about articles, videos, and such, and focus on self-generated user topics.
•   selftext: "GTX 3090" -- Searches the body of self-made posts. In this case, it's searching for references to the GTX 3090 video card. Note that we enclosed the multi-word search term in quotes.
•   site :theatlantic.com -- Searches for submitted articles or content from a specific domain. Useful for location discussions about content from specific news sources or finding a post you forgot to save and can only recall the general domain.
•   subreddit :buildapchelp -- Restricts search results to a given subreddit. Useful when you have a good idea which subreddit has the information you're looking for, such as searching /r/buildapchelp for help with your PC project or /r/plantclinic if you need help diagnosing what's wrong with your houseplant.
•   title: "white bugs" -- Filters based on submission title. If you were already filtering to /r/plantclinic you might further filter to "white bugs" in the title for more focused results.
•   url :technology -- This filter looks for the parameter within the URL of the submitted content. By itself it is almost totally useless but when combined with the site: filter it allows you to drill down into content from that site. Searching for site :theatlantic.com   url :technology , for example, returns just submitted articles from The Atlantic and in the Technology subsection of the magazine (because they group them under /technology/).

In addition to those search filters, you can use Boolean operators to include or exclude search terms. Reddit supports AND, OR, and NOT. You can group parts with parentheticals.

• AND -- All the words must appear in the search results, such as "Intel AND 3080 AND budget."
• OR -- Search results can include either term, such as "Intel AND AMD."
• NOT -- Search results include the first term, exclude the second term. Such as, "MSI NOT Zotac"

You can also combine the two, filters and Boolean operators, together. Searching for

, for example, will limit your search to the /r/buildapc and display only posts which have both "1080" and "3080" in the title.

When these tools are useful, they're very useful. When you remember things about what you're looking for or you have a very good idea where you need to look and what search terms to use, you have a solid chance of finding it.

But they're not quite up to snuff with single-purpose search engines, so let's take a look at using Google to get better search results when you're casting a broader net.

Despite that search update in April 2022 , we mentioned a moment ago, the internal Reddit search just can't compete with Google. Sure you're less likely to get bizarre search results from horror-centric creative writing subs in your on-site Reddit search results now, so that's great, but it's just not the same as using Google.

Rather than limit yourself to throwing "reddit" on the end of your Google search queries, however, you can use a few Google search tricks to essentially create a custom Reddit search engine powered by Google's spooky Eye of Sauron abilities.

Let's start with the first search parameter you'll need and build from there. Instead of adding "reddit" to the end of your search, start it off by using the "site:" search flag to narrow it down to just the reddit domain. This functions exactly as the site search in the previous section about Reddit's internal search.

So anytime you're using Google (or any other search engine with similar search flags) to search Reddit, you should start with:

Just switching over to searching with Google gives you an immediate algorithmic-boost and you might be happy with the search results right out of the gate.

If you're not, however, you can easily use all the regular Google search parameters and tricks to narrow down the scope of your search.

Related: How to Search Google Like a Pro: 11 Tricks You Have to Know

Boolean operators like AND and OR, as we outlined in the previous section work. To exclude something as if you're using NOT, instead use a dash. So to search for MSI not Zotac, you would search for

While Google search is superior, overall, to Reddit's native search, there are a few areas where it does fall short, however. Several of the tools built into Reddit's native search just don't have equivalents that you can use when searching with Google.

For instance the Reddit search flags like

, and so on don't have any sort of Google equivalent nor can you bend a particular search trick to your will to replicate them. You can't, for example, recreate author-based search on Google by, say, changing out "reddit.com" to "reddit.com/user/theirusername" in your search query because the user pages aren't indexed by Google. (You can still search, broadly, by username but it's not quite the same).

You can, however, recreate the

parameter by limiting yourself to the URL of the subreddit. For example if you were searching for information on gaming monitors and came across the /r/buildapcmonitors subreddit, a sub devoted exclusively to monitor recommendations, you may wish to restrict your search. You could do so by simply appending the site: entry like so:

Doing so would limit your query about "best 4k gaming monitor" to just that subreddit.

Overall we recommend starting broad with your

search and drilling down only if you find the results aren't focused enough. Typically the top-level results, without additional tweaking, or pretty useful.

Restricting your search to particular subreddits and/or using the date filter to limit the results to the last 6-12 months, however, can be useful when searching for things related to current events or computer hardware where you want the most up-to-date information.

Related: How to Delete Your Reddit History

If you make no other changes to your Reddit's searching habits than switching from plain old "reddit" to 

you'll be in good shape. The popularity of Reddit means not only is there a lot of content actually hosted by Reddit to parse through but there are tons of non-Reddit sites also mentioning Reddit (exactly like the article you're currently reading, as a matter of fact). Restricting yourself to just Reddit.com results is an immediate search powerup.

As for when to use native Reddit search over Google search, or vice versa? If you're already a Reddit user and familiar with the conventions of Reddit then using the Reddit search to find very specific things can be quite useful. But for the vast majority of people who just want to tap into Reddit users' vast knowledge base, letting Google's algorithmic magic comb through the data for you is the way to go.

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[STRICTLY NO SOURCING] subreddit for the discussion of synthetic psychoactive research chemicals a.k.a. Novel Psychoactive Substances (NPS)

Introducing the "Research Community": A Safe Haven for Research Chemical Enthusiasts

Note: This post has been pre-approved by the mods, specifically u/cyrilio - This is not unsolicited advertising!

How do you do, fellow researchers? I'm excited to introduce you to a vibrant and inclusive community that's all about education, harm reduction, and fostering a safe space for anyone interested in psychoactive substances. Allow me to present to you the Research Community!

At the Research Community, we aim to provide a platform where individuals can come together to share knowledge, experiences, and insights about research chemicals and other psychoactive substances. Whether you're an experienced researcher or just starting to explore this fascinating realm, our community welcomes you with open arms!

Discord and Matrix Community:

Our primary hubs of discussion are our Discord and Matrix servers. Here, you'll find a diverse and knowledgeable community that is passionate about education, harm reduction, and responsible exploration. We have dedicated channels for discussing specific substances, harm reduction practices, research methodologies, and more. Connect with like-minded individuals, ask questions, seek advice, and engage in conversations that will expand your understanding of research chemicals.

Please note that the most active platform right now is our Discord server. Our Matrix instance, as of right now, only serves as a more privacy-focused "addition" to the Discord server, where rules are also more relaxed.

Safe and Inclusive Space:

We believe in creating a safe and inclusive space for everyone, regardless of their background or level of expertise. Our community values mutual respect, open-mindedness, and the willingness to learn from one another. We have dedicated moderators who actively ensure that discussions remain respectful and informative. Feel free to express your thoughts, share experiences, and engage in healthy debates while maintaining a positive atmosphere.

Educational Resources:

Our community understands the importance of knowledge and responsible research. We provide a space to share and discuss a wealth of educational resources, including articles, research papers, harm reduction guidelines, and trip reports, to help you navigate the vast world of research chemicals. From pharmacological profiles to synthesis techniques, our aim is to empower you with accurate and reliable information.

New Forum Launch:

Exciting news! We have recently launched our very own forum, providing another avenue for discussions and knowledge sharing. The forum complements our Discord and Matrix servers, allowing for more in-depth and organized conversations. It's an excellent place to dive deeper into specific topics, participate in ongoing research projects, and engage with the community at your own pace.

Join the Research Community Today!

If you're passionate about research chemicals and want to be part of a community dedicated to education, harm reduction, and inclusive dialogue, we invite you to join us at the Research Community. Here are the links to get started: