Why r/antiwork’s Conversation Endures Beyond the Headlines

Table of Links

Abstract and 1. Introduction

2. Related Work

3. Methodology

4. Results

5. Discussion

6. Conclusion, References, and Appendix

5 DISCUSSION

Our study aimed to explore how user activity on r/antiwork was impacted by a gradual, sustained increase of subscribers, followed by a period of accelerated growth coinciding with mainstream media coverage of the Great Resignation. Instead, we found an online community where the parallel surge in posts and comments became decoupled from subscriber growth and collapsed after Doreen Ford’s Fox News interview even as the number of subscribers continued to rise (RQ1). Change point detection provided suggestive evidence that user activity was driven by mainstream media events in mid-October 2021 and late January 2022, as the dates of these events were independently identified in both posting and commenting data (Figures 2 and 3, respectively). We found that different types of users had a disproportionate influence on overall activity, with light posters and heavy commenters being responsible for almost a third of posts and comments, respectively (Figures 2 and 3) (RQ2). Light and heavy posters were responsible for similar proportions of posts prior to October 2021, but then gradually diverged until light posters were responsible for almost half of all posts by the end of July 2022 where our data set ends (Figure 4). Commenting trends, on the other hand, appeared to be undisturbed by October’s surge in new subscribers and January’s collapse in activity (Figure 5). While there was a spike in heavy commenters making their last comment immediately following the Fox News interview, it does not appear to have been a sufficient reduction to affect broader trends. Lastly, despite anecdotal observations that the quality of discussion on r/antiwork had declined due to subscriber growth, we found no evidence to support this claim (RQ3). In general, the main topics of discussion were the same in all three time periods studied: the top-ranked topics were always Quitting, Reddit and Mental Health, and the topics shared by all time periods accounted for 60.6-74.1% of content (Table A1). Furthermore, we believe that we underestimated the degree of similarity between topic distributions, because a topic in one time period would sometimes correspond to two topics in another time period (e.g. Food/Drugs in period 1 versus separate Food and Drugs topics found in both period 2 and 3).

Many studies use topic modelling to identify what is being discussed in online communities and to identify changes over time. We identified Mental Health and Quitting as two of the most prevalent topics on r/antiwork. This finding is in agreement with a study by del Rio-Chanona et al. that identified mental health issues as one of the main reasons for members of the r/jobs subreddit to quit their jobs, especially since the onset of the pandemic [9]. We also saw the introduction of a Pandemic topic that was unique to the period from October 25 2021-January 25 2022 (period 2), suggesting that the surge of new members shared their work-related experiences from during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found no evidence of a change in the topic distribution between time periods, in accordance with other studies of massive growth in online communities [23]. This does not, however, discount the fact that an influx of newcomers could subtly change the feel of an online community. For example, Haq et al. identify significant differences in writing style between new and long-term users, with new users writing shorter comments with more emojis [15]. Numerous studies also point to the temporary nature of long-term member grievances: Lin et al. observed a dip in upvotes in newly defaulted subreddits that recovered quickly afterwards and, moreover, that complaints about low quality posts did not increase in frequency after defaulting [23].

In an interview-based study, Kiene et al. showed how r/nosleep attributed the subreddit’s resilience in the face of sustained growth to active moderators and a shared sense of community [20]. It seems likely that this was the case with r/antiwork as well: several of the moderators have been involved since the subreddit’s inception and have publicly championed the political objectives of the antiwork movement. Furthermore, there is a consistent hard core of heavy commenters, implying a sense of community at least among long-term members.

5.1 Limitations

In our study, we observed how mainstream media events coincided with changes in activity on r/antiwork (subscriber count, posting and commenting), but it is unclear to what extent these events were causal. In October 2021, the topics discussed on r/antiwork happened to align with the broader zeitgeist of worker dissatisfaction following the COVID-19 pandemic, so it seems likely that members would have found the subreddit through other means, such as the Reddit front page. Our findings related to the Fox News interview, however, do not appear to suffer from this limitation as the fallout had such wide and direct consequences, including the drop in posting and commenting activity, the loss of members, and was even captured by the topic model as a distinct topic.

Another limitation was the lack of data available from before 2019, when r/antiwork was a smaller and more focused community. Had we been able to include the earliest data, we might have seen greater differences in the topic distribution between then and 2022 than what we observed in our study. However, being a small sample, it would have had significant variance, leading to issues with the interpretation of results.

5.2 Future Research

In this study, we focused on characterising the development of r/antiwork and looked at how the surge of new members impacted user behaviour and what topics were being discussed. In future research, we plan to further investigate the aftermath of the Fox News interview. On January 26 2022, a subreddit called r/WorkReform was founded by disgruntled members of r/antiwork, gaining over 400,000 subscribers within 24 hours. We want to investigate the differences between the two subreddits in terms of users, topics discussed and reactions to major events, such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022. Second, we want to take a deeper look at the users of r/antiwork, using their other activity on Reddit to understand why they behave the way they do. We believe that users who want to post about quitting their job could be more dissimilar to one another than heavy commenters whose interests are more likely to be focused on topics in r/antiwork.

6 CONCLUSION

In this paper, we presented an study of how subscribers, posts and comments on r/antiwork were impacted by events in the media, how heavy and light user behaviour differed from one another, and a content analysis based on topic modelling to show how the discourse on the subreddit evolved. We have shown that, despite the continuing rise of subscribers, activity on r/antiwork collapsed after the Fox News interview on January 25 2022. We showed that heavy commenters and light posters have a disproportionate influence on subreddit activity, making almost a third of overall comments and posts, respectively. Over time, light posters have become responsible for an increasing proportion of posts, reaching almost 50% of posts by the end of July 2022. Heavy and light commenters, however, appeared unaffected by the surge of users, being responsible for approximately the same number of comments per post throughout the period studied. Commenting trends were not even impacted when 4.4% of heavy commenters made their last comment on r/antiwork between January 26-28 2022 after the broadcast of the Fox News interview. Lastly, the influx of new users did not appear to change the topical content of discussion: all three time periods had the same top-3 topics: Quitting, Reddit and Mental Health. Each time period had distinct topics, but they tended to be related to seasonal events and ongoing developments in the news. Overall, we found no evidence of major shifts in the topical content of discussion over the period studied.

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A APPENDIX

A.1 Topic models