[lcrz]

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.