Reddit: Affordances as an Enabler for Shifting Loyalties

Abstract

This paper examines the affordances of Reddit, a digital media platform where Users share and discuss content. The aim of the study was to understand the affordances of Reddit, and how the affordances of Reddit through various features of the platform lead to outcomes, specifically those relating to political loyalty and the creation of political narratives. The study contributes an insight into the evolution and understanding of affordances as a result of examining the ways in which individuals who were previously members of another political group constructed narratives around switching their support to the Trump campaign in the 2016 US presidential elections. The study specifically focusses on an exclusive membership community called r/The_Donald. As a result of analysing posts on common themes using Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA), we conclude that the features enable membership of a community to be rewarded, switched or denied. As a result, this study has identified five affordances of Reddit, which include credibility, expressing oneself freely, echoing beliefs, creating membership and the metaaffordance 'Redpilling'. The outcomes of these affordances are that ingroups are created, support can be switched, extreme or hateful views are legitimised and a new brand of conservatism is given credibility. This in turn is concluded to have realised impacts outside of the virtual environment in this case on the self-reported behaviours of voters.

Clear and Omnipresent Danger: Digital Age Culture Wars and Reactions to Drag Queen Story Hour across Diverse Subreddit Communities

“…Compared to previous waves of the culture wars, the current wave is unique in a couple of important ways. First, whereas popular media and elites determined which issues and viewpoints were worthy of attention during previous waves (Hunter 1991), the culture wars of the digital age are often fought by populist voices on social media platforms marked by selective exposure such that users tend to consume information that aligns with their political views (Ganesh 2020; Gaudette et al 2020; Gerbaudo 2018; Mills 2018; Nagle 2017; Prakasam & Huxtable-Thomas 2020; Robards 2018). Second, in previous waves of the culture wars, individuals have typically engaged in conflict over cultural change that posed a “clear and present danger” to their local communities and largely avoided conflicts that lied outside their local communities (Tepper 2011).…”

“…Pairing this with patterns of selective exposure (whereby social media users tend to consume information that aligns with their political views) can drive political polarization (Spohr 2017). In fact, scholars have credited social media with providing a venue for like-minded individuals to build partisan identities, especially for those that lie at the extreme right end of the partisan continuum (Davis 2019; Ganesh 2020; Gaudette et al 2020; Mills 2018; Nagle 2017; Prakasam & Huxtable-Thomas 2020; Robards 2018).…”

Tracking Self-reported Symptoms and Medical Conditions on Social Media During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Infodemiological Study

“…We defined forums as thread-based message boards and topic-specific pages [ 24 ]. We chose these sources to provide diversity because they have been studied less than Twitter in this area [ 25 , 26 ]. Additionally, the user base profile of our sources appeared to be more representative of the demographic profile of the broader US population than Twitter.…”

“…Furthermore, even though there is an overlap between the affordance among our sources and Twitter, Reddit users have more anonymity as they do not need to register an account to access the majority of the content, thus allowing for greater participation [ 25 ]. Lastly, forums such as Reddit allow lengthy submissions and are usually topic-specific, which grant opportunities to cover the sensitive topics of our study (eg, mental health disorders and symptoms), which may not typically be discussed on social media [ 26 , 28 ].…”

Design is More Than Looks: Research on the Affordance of Review Components on Consumer Loyalty

“…Scholars also verified that the affordance of Reddit platform lead to political loyalty and destination loyalty. 38 , 39 Based on the S-O-R framework, such loyal behavior can originate from stimuli that include internal and external sources of information, for example, the website quality 40 and reputation, 41 respectively. As important information cues, IT affordance has been previously utilized as stimuli in the S-O-R framework in recent studies.…”