Project 3 Proposal

Discourse Community: Reddit

            Reddit qualifies as a Discourse community according to Swales by matching all of Swales’ six characteristics:

1.) Broadly agreed set of common public goals:

Reddit is a website whose goals are that of spreading information, whether that information is funny pictures, music, answering question, and even scientific articles.

2/3.) Mechanisms of intercommunication among members/these methods used primarily for providing information and feedback:

Reddit has a message system where you can, if you are a member, send and receive messages from other redditors. Most messages are sent in order to let other members know something that they may have done wrong (not following rules etc.) or compliment them on a certain post. Per each post there is a comment section where users can provide feedback on specific posts that all members and even non-members can see.

4.) Utilizes and posses one or more genres:

Reddit has many “subreddits”, each possessing a main focus on a different genre. For example, there are subreddits such as r/funny, r/politics, r/science, r/audioengineering, and so forth. Each of these “subreddits” focuses on a separate genre, which are usually obvious based on the subreddits title (funny, politics, science, and audio engineering respectively).

5.) Acquired specific lexis:

Reddit has a few very specific things that most people wouldn’t understand if they were not members or lurkers. The word lurker for example is part of the lexis. There are also other words/grammatical styles used. A lurker is someone who never comments or votes on posts but still browses. When someone says “r/” then says a words such as “r/science” they are talking about that subreddit. This is because the URL for subreddits is www.reddit.com/r/science. That would be the URL for the subreddit science. People also post comments sometimes using what I would call a meme style. They use the constant text from a meme and post it in a way that makes sense in context mainly used as a joke. Redditors (people who partake in Reddit goodness), at least most, have acquired a knowledge of memes; those memes depend on what subreddits are browsed. One of the most important lexis would be Reddiquette. These are basically the rules of posting and each subreddit has a variation of Reddiquette that needs to be followed, and at the whole-site level (not specifically subreddits) there are a very general set of rules that ALL subreddits must follow.

6.) A threshold level of members with a degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise:

Reddit has millions of active members and each subreddit has a counter of ‘subscribed’ readers as well as a counter of online readers. Some subreddits die and therefore are no longer active, but for the most part subreddits get a lot of relevant content, and if it is too off topic the moderators of said subreddit can remove it. Although not all posts are on topic (the subreddit r/funny is notorious for having posts containing nothing to do with their goal), most subreddits do have very relevant content posted often.

          My interest in Reddit is mainly because I am on it far too often and waste away most of my life on it. I think it will be easiest for me to pick Reddit for the project. As for learning more about it I think maybe getting to know the creators more would be a good piece of knowledge and probably even interesting. I think if possible interviewing one of the creators, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. The set of texts I can analyze would be a couple subreddits, more specifically NOT r/funny.