Posting Patterns of Members of Parental Subreddits
Nazanin Sabri, Mai Elsherief
TL;DR
This paper investigates posting patterns of parents on Reddit, shifting focus from content to user activity. It builds a dataset of 34,766,546 posts by 667,141 users across 390,728 subreddits, focusing on 55 parental subreddits. It constructs two weighted co-posting graphs to quantify cross-posting patterns and applies modularity-based community detection to reveal interconnected subreddits and cross-topic clusters. The results show that a majority of users post only once in parental subreddits but stay active across diverse communities for years, and expanding the parental-subreddit list to 115 enables broader cross-topic analyses with potential implications for understanding parental concerns and cross-community support.
Abstract
Online forums (e.g., Reddit) are used by many parents to discuss their challenges, needs, and receive support. While studies have investigated the contents of posts made to popular parental subreddits revealing the family health concerns being expressed, little is known about parents' posting patterns or other issues they engage in. In this study, we explore the posting activity of users of 55 parental subreddits. Exploring posts made by these users (667K) across Reddit (34M posts) reveals that over 85% of posters are not one-time users of Reddit and actively engage with the community. Studying cross-posting patterns also reveals the use of subreddits dedicated to other topics such as relationship and health advice (e.g., r/AskDocs, r/relationship_advice) by this population. As a result, for a comprehensive understanding of the type of information posters share and seek, future work should investigate sub-communities outside of parental-specific ones. Finally, we expand the list of parental subreddits, compiling a total of 115 subreddits that could be utilized in future studies of parental concerns.