CS224W Project Milestone Report Upon the Advent of Eternal September: a Case Study on Reddit Communities’ Latent Networks

Although online communities often regard membership growth as an important goal of their development, research has shown that large influx of new users may interrupt a community’s wellness by introducing information overload and lowering content quality [1], [2], which is also know as “Eternal September”1 from the infamous case of Usenet’s fall[3]. Founded in 2005, Reddit, as one of the most popular online communities2, has accumulated a large user base over time. Among those popular subreddits, a handful of them have been made default for users throughout the past several years. Upon defaulted, those subreddits started to attract a substantial number of users every day and the trend has not shown a sign of decline. Did this surge of newcomers truly bring those subreddits increased popularity or it actually tore those communities down from inside? How did the older users react to newcomers? How did the newcomers reshape the community’s latent network structure as well as other community characteristics, if any at all? How does old and new users interact with each other after defaulting happens? We plan to look into these problems from a network perspective.