# The anatomy of Reddit: An overview of academic research

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.10881 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.10881/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 25 Oct 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Co-Writing with Opinionated Language Models Affects Users' Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00560/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning for Suicide and Depression Identification with Unsupervised Label Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09427/) (2021)
- [Collective Behavior of AI Agents: the Case of Moltbook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09270/) (2026)
- [Automating Customer Needs Analysis: A Comparative Study of Large Language Models in the Travel Industry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17975/) (2024)
- [With Flying Colors: Predicting Community Success in Large-scale Collaborative Campaigns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09650/) (2023)
- [Structure and dynamics of growing networks of Reddit threads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04085/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Monolingual and Multilingual Large Language Models for Greek Question Answering: The DemosQA Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16811/) (2026)
- [This Must Be the Place: Predicting Engagement of Online Communities in a Large-scale Distributed Campaign](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05334/) (2022)
- [Revealing Patient-Reported Experiences in Healthcare from Social Media using the DAPMAV Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04232/) (2022)
- [LLMs are Introvert](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05638/) (2025)
- [The Healthy States of America: Creating a Health Taxonomy with Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01169/) (2021)
- [The Influence of Text Variation on User Engagement in Cross-Platform Content Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03769/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Online forums provide rich environments where users may post questions and comments about different topics. Understanding how people behave in online forums may shed light on the fundamental mechanisms by which collective thinking emerges in a group of individuals, but it has also important practical applications, for instance to improve user experience, increase engagement or automatically identify bullying. Importantly, the datasets generated by the activity of the users are often openly available for researchers, in contrast to other sources of data in computational social science. In this survey, we map the main research directions that arose in recent years and focus primarily on the most popular platform, Reddit. We distinguish and categorise research depending on their focus on the posts or on the users, and point to different types of methodologies to extract information from the structure and dynamics of the system. We emphasize the diversity and richness of the research in terms of questions and methods, and suggest future avenues of research.