# Evolution of Reddit: From the Front Page of the Internet to a Self-referential Community?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.1386 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1402.1386/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Feb 2014.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Contextualizing Internet Memes Across Social Media Platforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11157/) (2023)
- [Suicidal Ideation Detection on Social Media: A Review of Machine Learning Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10515/) (2022)
- [When AI Agents Teach Each Other: Discourse Patterns Resembling Peer Learning in the Moltbook Community](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14477/) (2026)
- [Fluent but Unfeeling: The Emotional Blind Spots of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09593/) (2025)
- [ChronoPlay: A Framework for Modeling Dual Dynamics and Authenticity in Game RAG Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18455/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the past few years, Reddit -- a community-driven platform for submitting, commenting and rating links and text posts -- has grown exponentially, from a small community of users into one of the largest online communities on the Web. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the most comprehensive longitudinal study of Reddit's evolution to date, studying both (i) how user submissions have evolved over time and (ii) how the community's allocation of attention and its perception of submissions have changed over 5 years based on an analysis of almost 60 million submissions. Our work reveals an ever-increasing diversification of topics accompanied by a simultaneous concentration towards a few selected domains both in terms of posted submissions as well as perception and attention. By and large, our investigations suggest that Reddit has transformed itself from a dedicated gateway to the Web to an increasingly self-referential community that focuses on and reinforces its own user-generated image- and textual content over external sources.