I think the thesis is wrong. It’s not that the average interaction is with familiar individuals. I’ve been a mod, lurker and commenter on a lot of subreddits. And on each of those, there are maybe 10 users I recognize and whose comments I see occasionally.
What is the case, is that on short timescales, the average interaction is consistent with what I expect from the community. The anonymity of Reddit has show that the specific face or individual doesn’t matter. It has a ‘friend’ or ‘follow’ option that I’ve never used and really never felt like I needed to use it.
Reddit actually became less familiar to me when I saw users tag other users in a post to share them with other users. The same with user specific subreddits. It’s when Reddit moved from content centric to user centric.
What is the case, is that on short timescales, the average interaction is consistent with what I expect from the community. The anonymity of Reddit has show that the specific face or individual doesn’t matter. It has a ‘friend’ or ‘follow’ option that I’ve never used and really never felt like I needed to use it.
Reddit actually became less familiar to me when I saw users tag other users in a post to share them with other users. The same with user specific subreddits. It’s when Reddit moved from content centric to user centric.