Being part of a social research project is great. Because I hopped on an already moving train, the goals of the project were clear, which gave me a clear purpose. For the time being that purpose consists of circulating a survey. Although I hadn’t touched the account in years, I used to be quite active on Reddit in high school and had gained quite a few social points on the website. We thought that this would allow us to post in more subforums on the website, so my account was chosen to spread the questionnaire on the platform. And that’s what I’m doing right now.
The first few posts gained immediate reactions and indeed led to a significant increase in people taking the survey. Unfortunately, the automatic moderation of Reddit had quickly flagged our posts as spam and removed all but our first three posts from the feeds of the redditors.
To be clear, I do believe that our posts were correctly flagged as spam: we were sending a very similar message to many different places that led people away from the website. The difference between this and other types of spam, however, is our goal: increasing our shared knowledge seems a lot more noble a cause than sharing the new video you made.
In any case, we had to scramble to figure out a way to get our posts back up. We read that the only way to appeal this verdict was by approaching the moderators of every subforum one by one, and asking if they could manually unflag the post. This turned out to be the way to go, because many of the exchanges made it clear that the post would have been removed manually anyways since we didn’t ask them before posting it. Thankfully, many of the moderators agreed with our proclaimed purpose, and unflagged the post.
Many visitors deem it necessary to react to the survey in the comments. As of now, reactions include suggestions how to spread the survey further, questions about specific parts of the survey and comments on why the questionnaire isn’t a right fit for them or the subforum it was posted on. These reactions all provide information that the survey doesn’t let them share, and in that way help us reflect on what we asked about.
I would describe these comments as showing genuine interest while still approaching me as an “outsider.” This seems to be the moment where my previous experience as a Redditor comes in, because these comments require fitting reactions themselves: we don’t want prospective participants to be put off by reductively negative comments and would like to encourage the more constructive engagement. I try to be helpful when possible in my own reactions, and mirror the mode the reactions take. If the comment is snarky, my first line snaps back (while continuing in a lighter tone and acknowledging a possible concern they had):
If it’s pointing to a weakness in a question, for example the lack of possibility to distinguish between having played a game for 200 or 1500 hours, I explain why we made that choice (if I believe it won’t compromise the answers) and thank them for the feedback:
This mirroring showed that I was not that much of an outsider, that I understood the way conversations happen on reddit, while still explicitly being there with the goal of having people fill in the survey.
What I don’t know for sure is when I cross the line of divulging so much information that I compromise the answers of possible survey-takers, and how I can stay approachable if I have to keep that information undisclosed. This is definitely a place in which I need to improve before I feel comfortable taking part in the other parts of the project, especially ones that contain real-time communication.
