Big thanks to @galenweld.bsky.social for leading this work , along with Carl Pearson, @bradspahn.bsky.social, @timalthoff.bsky.social, and @amyxzhang.bsky.social, along with colleagues at Reddit for supporting this research!
This paper used a broad set of tools under the hood to study communities: from factor analysis to LIWC-22 to interaction motifs to hierarchical models. Check out the paper to learn more! arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08596
If you design or manage communities, how do you think about encouraging replies, surfacing gratitude, and encouraging inclusive language? What strategies have worked (or not) for you in the past?
Style: More expressions of gratitude, feeling, and third-person plural drive SOVC generally. "Netspeak" (e.g. lol, haha, emoji) and a focus on the future are signals of stronger membership & belonging. Is this the case in your favorite communities?
Structure: We find that reciprocal replies are great predictors of stronger communities across all three dimensions; reciprocal upvotes drive feelings of membership, while reciprocal downvotes surprisingly don't decrease SOVC.
We identify 19 features capturing the style and structure of conversations, which together explain 33% of the variance in SOVC scores, with style capturing more than structure.
We find that community experiences (SOVC) on Reddit can reliably be distinguished along three dimensions: Membership & Belonging, Cooperation & Shared Values, and Connection & Influence.
Think of a community as an engine. What would you listen for to know if it's running right? The murmur of messages, the rumble of replies, the sparks of support
In this #ICWSM2026 paper, we identify topic-agnostic conversation features that reveal how well a community is vibing.
Crunching away on a paper for #CHI2026 about online communities, moderation, or sociolinguistics?
You may be want to check out recent work led by
@galenweld.bsky.social on predicting SOVC within subreddits based on the style and structure of conversations.
arxiv.org/abs/2508.08596
Screenshot of title and abstract of article in Social Media & Society.
Out today in Social Media + Society!
In a new paper with @skairam.bsky.social, we conduct a longitudinal survey with Reddit trace data to compare the demographics and behaviors of users who follow local subreddits and those who do not.
Here's what we learned🧵
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Excited to be talking about my online communities research tomorrow at @princetoncitp.bsky.social! Hope to see you in person, but otherwise you can catch the livestream from anywhere!
I’m excited about how far we got the program in a short time and am very confident in the Reddit team’s ability to keep making progress on RFR.
What a treat to work on this project with @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social -- so happy to see it out in the world!
What if we could help prevent rule-breaking in online communities by guiding contributors towards better contributions before they even hit submit?
Read Manoel's thread to learn more!
Thanks!
Definitely exciting! Thanks!
Thanks -- appreciate the kind words!
Thanks!
Hey Jeff -- thanks! I've somehow looped all the way back around to our work on "crowd parting"
Same!!!
Thanks so much! Great to see you in Costa Rica @acm-cscw.bsky.social!
Thanks and definitely not! It's been an exceptionally busy couple of weeks but I'll be back posting soon!
Thanks!
Thanks! Sadly this means fewer collab opportunities in the near future, but hopefully not forever!
This new role provides an opportunity to jump into the deep end of understanding how to ensure that these systems perform in ways that align with users' expectations and objectives. To my new team at OpenAI: I'm excited to dive into this next chapter together!
After 15 years of studying social media, this also represents a big pivot in my career. Over the past few years, I've become increasingly interested in how LLM's will work alongside individuals and within teams to help people achieve their goals.
I'm so grateful to Laura Nestler, Roxy Young, and Chris Slowe at Reddit for their support, guidance, & advocacy over the past 2.5 years and for championing Reddit for Researchers. I'm sad to move on from this project, but feel lucky to have played a role in bringing this ambitious vision to life!
Big year for career updates...I’m happy to share that I’m starting a new position as Member of Technical Staff
at OpenAI! I'll be joining the Research Org in the Human Data team, where I'll be helping to evaluate and improve models across the company.
check out this new CMU HCII Starter Pack!
go.bsky.app/EVdwwqT
(if I missed you, just let me know!)
Starter pack with current and former CDSC members. We'll update it if and when more folks join Bluesky.
go.bsky.app/Jeez5Hk
