Reddit’s cops and cop-watchers: Resisting and insisting on change in online interpretive communities

Abstract

This study explores how two subreddits—r/Bad_Cop_No_Donut (Donut) and r/ProtectAndServe (PnS)—function as online interpretive communities discussing the same topic: police conduct. Members of Donut construct a genre from videos depicting a history of police violence in order to advocate for policing reform, arguing that cop-watching practices that produce this genre are essential to driving changes in policing. Members of PnS construct a genre from similar videos in order to advocate for resisting systemic reform, reading these videos as professional development opportunities for police to reestablish legitimacy with the public. Donut insists on change, while PnS resists change. Donut produces a discourse which engages with historical instances of police misconduct; PnS produces a discourse which rarely engages with this history. Studying these processes of interpretation reveals how dissonant meanings can arise from the same material, how meaning is made in communities consuming and repurposing texts, and how historical narratives are essential to challenging structural inequity.

No Space for Reddit Spacing: Mapping the Reflexive Relationship Between Groups on 4chan and Reddit

“…This text concerns how this dialectic manifests among 4chan and Reddit's many users, with a focus on 4chan. 6 Where Pao's comparison concerned a C-suite debate, it is wellobserved how such reflexive cross-site associations are entwined with grassroots forms of boundary policing and identity formation (e.g., Buozis, 2021;Milner, 2016). Especially among 4channers, it is a de facto practice not only to antagonize other boards but also to scold entire platforms and online spheres to protect and negotiate subcultural mores (De Zeeuw & Tuters, 2020;Nissenbaum & Shifman, 2017;Phillips, 2015).…”

“…Less attention has been paid to cross-site relations between comparably subcultural spaces. Several studies have dealt with “internal” conflicts between subreddits (e.g., Buozis, 2021; Efstratiou et al, 2022; Marchal, 2020), while other texts have touched on 4chan’s “symbiotic” relationship with Tumblr (Beran, 2019; Hagen, 2023). Yet the 4chan–Reddit rivalry has only attracted sparse scholarly attention, even though it marks a historically significant online linkage, as I will go on to show (for exceptions, see Donovan et al, 2022; Gallagher & Topinka, 2023; Trammell, 2014).…”