Qualitiative Survey and Taxonomy

Overview

This survey was conducted with 39 redditors who identified as members of 125 different subreddits. Each participant was asked, for each subreddit they are a member of, what aspects of the community they like, and what aspects they would like to improve upon. Using iterative categorization, these free-text responses were clustered to produce a taxonomy of 29 different values redditors have for their communities.

Paper

For more details, see our paper on arXiv.

Taxonomy

Our taxonomy of community values consists of 29 values across 9 major categories.

1. Quality of Content
   1. Education, Entertainment
   2. Personal Preferences
   3. Curation, Recency, Discovery
   4. Spam, Reposts, Bots
2. Community Engagement
   1. Quality of Interaction or Community as a Whole
   2. Connection, Universalization
3. Diversity
   1. Diversity of Content
   2. Diversity of People
4. Size
   1. Volume of Content
   2. Size of Community
5. Participation and Inclusion
   1. Offensive, Abusive, Harassing Content or Behaviors
   2. Outsiders, Demographics, Limits
   3. Tools for Participation
6. Technical Features
   1. Flair, Tags, NSFW Labels
   2. Search, Filters
   3. Recomendation Systems
7. Moderation and Moderators
8. Norms
   1. Voting Behavior
   2. Adherence to Norms
9. Trust
   1. Knowledgeable People
   2. Trustworthy Content

For more details, see our paper on arXiv.

Survey Instrument

The survey instrument is available here.