Reason why Reddit is a singular echo chamber and it will stay that way

If you are someone who has been on Reddit for some time, you might have gotten a feeling that you can predict what will happen to a post/comment in the near future. The feeling persists all across Reddit, ranging from likes/comments behaviors on political news posts to the horrifying fate of comments with emojis (except 🗿). This post aims to unravel the mystery behind this unsettling power of Reddit veterans,

Introduction

For those who aren’t familiar, Reddit is categorized as a news aggregation and content discussion website. It is a popular social media platform choice for young people between the age of 18-29. Content type often comes as posts, which are organized in communities called  “subreddits”. A few distinguishable features are: up/down votes which are for content rating, and karma which is gained from upvotes and lost from upvotes. Karma, in particular, restricts your privilege to post in a subreddit if the amount is below a threshold set by the community.

From the title, you have seen that Reddit is being argued to be an “Echo Chamber”, which means in a formal term: “an environment where a person only encounters information or opinions that reflect and reinforce their own.“. As an example in real life, we often see people say Democrats and Republicans live in their own echo chambers and rarely care about the other sides’ opinions. In this post, we will see how Reddit’s current atmosphere, instead of the two-chamber we see in real life, is a single echo chamber and why it is there to stay.

Why Reddit is a single echo chamber

We will draw some important results to aid our analysis from the data analysis done by Matteo Cinelli, Gianmarco De Francisci, Morales, Alessandro, Galeazzi, Walter,  Quattrociocchi, and Michele Starnini.

First, Reddit is a left-leaning community in general.

Suppose a post or a user’s lean is between [-1, 1], representing two extremes in the political world. We can calculate the lean of a user by the sum of the lean of the posts divided by the total number of posts.

If a user comments on other users’ posts, an out-edge is created and vice versa for an in-edge. These interactions create a directed edge from one user to another, thus forming a neighborhood. To measure the homophily of a user, we can use the out-neighbor of a user, which is the act of moving toward another user. The average lean of the user’s out neighbors can be calculated with a slightly modified out-degree formula, where the sum is not the number of degrees but the sum of the lean of the neighbors.

The following graph is the correlation of each Reddit user’s political leaning compared to the neighbors’ in subreddits Politics, and News, which are often publicly advertised in the popular section. In a random environment, the graph should have users spread evenly. However, using the homophily test, we see almost all users are neighbored by someone in the left-leaning cluster, meaning edges that connect right-leaning users from any other user is extremely rare.  Thus, we solidify the homophily in Reddit users toward a left-leaning ideology.

Second, which should not come as a surprise as we have the result from the previous part, the community lean on political topics is left-leaning in general as well. The data obtained show subreddits’ opinions on topics of abortions and vaccines.

 

Analysis

Now that we established that Reddit is indeed a homogenous left-leaning echo chamber, we can discuss why this echo chamber is here to stay.

From the same study, the researchers observed that the lean of users after encountering content produced by a user with any lean did not change. (Seen by the graph below) This behavior explains the echo chambers’ persistence, but as per the post’s other question, why is it happening?

New users with controversial opinions will never be able to create influence. Suppose we have three nodes, node H represents a subreddit about a certain topic. Let node N be the user with right-leaning opinions interested in H and node O be the current subreddit members. By Strong Triadic Closure(STC), since both N and O are strongly interested in H, the users in O should eventually have at least a weak tie with N, which represents when N joins the subreddit. Now, let us consider a signed triangle between the three, where (N, H) and (O, H) are obviously +.

• If N never does anything, N and O remain in a + relationship and we have a balanced structure. However, this means N does not have any influential content.
• If N makes a controversial comment, N and O now have a – relationship and will use Reddit’s downvote system on the comment. The comment will never be seen by the majority as it has too many downvotes. N remains uninfluential. Note this is an unbalanced relationship, which means it is not here to stay and something has to change.
  • N can return to the previous case and do nothing, which remains no influence.
  • N can continue making controversial comments, but then he will eventually be kicked from the community due to reports.
  • N loses interest in the topic and the triangle no longer exists. No influence.
  • N is converted to be the same ideology as O and the relationship is +, creating a balanced structure. This also means nothing is done to create influence for N’s previous ideology.
• If N wants to make a post, N has to first appeal to O to gain karma. This content only reinforces the others’ ideology, meaning the influenced set of users still has the same lean. However, same as comments, even when N has enough karma, the first controversial post will never be seen by the majority of the subreddit, resulting in little to no influence.

From what we saw above, with the regulatory features of Reddit, N’s contents either have little to no reach which is when it’s about a controversial opinion, or the content has reach but reinforces the majority’s ideology. The latter could explain the behavior on the graph when the content produced by a user with a different lean reached a significant amount of people, it still had no effect on the influenced individuals’ lean.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Reddit itself is a homogenous echo chamber that is the result of its regulatory mechanics. Due to the Reddit giving the majority the power to control incoming information to the communities, the left-leaning echo chamber that is Reddit will stay this way for a long time. It is hard to identify and break out of echo chambers, especially one like Reddit where all its users have the same lean. With this new-found knowledge, you will be better aware of the potential consequences when entering user-regulated social platforms.

Sources

Homepage. Reddit. (n.d.). Retrieved October 2, 2022, from https://www.redditinc.com/

Published by S. Dixon, & 2, A. (2022, August 2). U.S. reddit reach by age group 2021. Statista. Retrieved October 2, 2022, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/261766/share-of-us-internet-users-who-use-reddit-by-age-group/

The Echo Chamber Effect on social media | PNAS. (n.d.). Retrieved October 3, 2022, from https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023301118