TY - JOUR AU - Krohn, Rachel AU - Weninger, Tim PY - 2022/05/31 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Subreddit Links Drive Community Creation and User Engagement on Reddit JF - Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media JA - ICWSM VL - 16 IS - 1 SE - Full Papers DO - 10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19313 UR - https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/19313 SP - 536-547 AB - On Reddit, individual subreddits are used to organize content and connect users. One mode of interaction is the subreddit link, which occurs when a user makes a direct reference to a subreddit in another community. Based on the ubiquity of these references, we have undertaken a study on subreddit links on Reddit, with the goal of understanding their impact on both the referenced subreddit, and on the subreddit landscape as a whole. By way of an extensive observational study along with several natural experiments using the entire history of Reddit, we were able to determine that (1) subreddit links are a significant driver of new subreddit creation; (2) subreddit links (2a) substantially drive activity in the referenced subreddit, and (2b) are frequently created in response to high levels of activity in the referenced subreddit; and (3) the graph of subreddit links has become less dense and more treelike over time. We conclude with a discussion of how these results confirm, add to, and in some cases conflict with existing theories on information-seeking behavior and self-organizing behavior in online social systems. ER -