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Monday 31 October 2016

23 Research Things - Thing 9

Reddit touts itself as "The Front Page of the Internet" and this claim is actually borne out in my experience. Everything seems to be on Reddit before anywhere else online. One week after it's on Reddit, it will start circulating on Twitter, quickly followed by Tumblr. Six months down the line your cousin will tag you when they post it on Facebook. My direct experiences with Reddit to date have been my husband showing me cute animal gifs, and occasionally responding to a meme or news story I'm telling him about with "Yeah, I already saw it on Reddit." That alone was enough to make me wonder whether I should be using it too so I used this prompt to take the time to set it up.

My first impression is that it would take a lot of time to figure out how best to use it for research or any other sane, grown-up use of social media. I disliked that you were automatically subscribed to the cute animal gif and politics subreddits. It took me a while of combing through a list of all the reddit pages unsubscribing from ones I was automatically added to before I could get the drop-down list of my subscriptions to a manageable size for further unsubscribing. There are seemingly endless communities you could join, all of which leads to it feeling pretty overwhelming. Careful curation seems to be the only way of dealing with it, but having recently deleted my Tumblr account, cut back on my Pinterest time to times I'm genuinely in need of inspiration and culled my Feedly, all in aid of only getting useful content, this feels like another time-sink and source of input-overload. Having just quit Tumblr, it feels like a brand new way to wear out my finger with incessant scrolling. For that reason it may be easier to search for threads you're interested in rather than using the front page, where content seldom seemed to be what I was directly interested in.

That being said, I think there are a few conceptual Subreddits that are worth following. I loved /r/explainlikeimfive for inspirational use of plain language to answer complex questions, for example. I could see myself using it for personal topics like personal finance and productivity as well. I enjoy that you can fully curate your front page, and once you get used to where to find the subreddit each thread was posted to you can start to think about which ones are cluttering up your front page for curation purposes. Reddit's advantage is in its grassroots nature, which it has somehow maintained despite how long it has been around. You can deal directly with other users you don't know in real life and it seems like a great way to have conversations without as much of the creep factor I get from Facebook.

The ultimate test of any of the tools I've explored as part of 23 Research Things is: would I recommend researchers use it? If so, how? I'm having trouble answering that one. I think it very much depends on personality. I've been around the internet long enough to find the message board structure and upvoting familiar, despite the rather clunky-looking UI. However, the barrier to entry is higher than for something pretty like Twitter and you have to wade through a lot of non-scholarly content unlike in ResearchGate. If you did use it for research I think you would need to do a lot of curating, be very disciplined about how much time you spend on it, and mine threads for useful information using the search function when you wanted specific information. I plan to give Reddit about a week before I see whether or not it stays part of my professional life.

Another tool mentioned, Wikis, are a useful form of knowledge management for groups - indeed, it's one of the classics - but I think that other tools have surpassed it in terms of usability if not robustness. It's good to think about the various web-based sources of knowledge sharing in terms of research in order to give yourself more options, even if you don't necessarily end up adopting them.

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