Nobody Wants to Work AnymoreAn Analysis of rantiwork and the Interplay between Social and Mainstream Media during the Great Resignation

2025-05-02 0 0 636.87KB 9 页 10玖币

侵权投诉

Nobody Wants to Work Anymore:

An Analysis of r/antiwork and the Interplay between Social and

Mainstream Media during the Great Resignation

Alan Medlar

University of Helsinki

Finland

alan.j.medlar@helsinki.

Yang Liu

University of Helsinki

Finland

yang.liu@helsinki.

Dorota Głowacka

University of Helsinki

Finland

dorota.glowacka@helsinki.

ABSTRACT

r/antiwork is a Reddit community that focuses on the discussion

of worker exploitation, labour rights and related left-wing political

ideas (e.g. universal basic income). In late 2021, r/antiwork became

the fastest growing community on Reddit, coinciding with what the

mainstream media began referring to as the Great Resignation. This

same media coverage was attributed with popularising the subreddit

and, therefore, accelerating its growth. In this article, we explore

how the r/antiwork community was aected by the exponential

increase in subscribers and the media coverage that chronicled its

rise. We investigate how subreddit activity changed over time, the

behaviour of heavy and light users, and how the topical nature of the

discourse evolved with the inux of new subscribers. We report that,

despite the continuing rise of subscribers well into 2022, activity on

the subreddit collapsed after January 25th 2022, when a moderator’s

Fox news interview was widely criticised. While many users never

commented again, longer running trends of users’ posting and

commenting behaviour did not change. Finally, while many users

expressed their discontent at the changing nature of the subreddit

as it became more popular, we found no evidence of major shifts in

the topical content of discussion over the period studied, with the

exception of the introduction of topics related to seasonal events

(e.g. holidays, such as Thanksgiving) and ongoing developments in

the news (e.g. working from home and the curtailing of reproductive

rights in the United States).

CCS CONCEPTS

•Computer systems organization →Embedded systems

;Re-

dundancy; Robotics; •Networks →Network reliability.

KEYWORDS

datasets, neural networks, gaze detection, text tagging

ACM Reference Format:

Alan Medlar, Yang Liu, and Dorota Głowacka. 2018. Nobody Wants to Work

Anymore: An Analysis of r/antiwork and the Interplay between Social

and Mainstream Media during the Great Resignation. In Proceedings of

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or

classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed

for prot or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation

on the rst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM

must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish,

to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specic permission and/or a

fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org.

Conference acronym ’XX, June 03–05, 2018, Woodstock, NY

ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-XXXX-X/18/06.. .$15.00

https://doi.org/XXXXXXX.XXXXXXX

Make sure to enter the correct conference title from your rights conrmation

emai (Conference acronym ’XX). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https:

//doi.org/XXXXXXX.XXXXXXX

1 INTRODUCTION

In 2021, the attrition rate of employees in the global workforce

reached record highs in an economic trend that became known as

the Great Resignation

. The COVID-19 pandemic had caused many

workers to leave the labour force because of problems related to

child and social care arrangements, early retirement and even death

[

]. The resulting labour shortages led to wage growth, encourag-

ing workers to quit their jobs and seek opportunities elsewhere [

More broadly, the trauma inicted by the pandemic led many to

question their relationship with work and to demand better work-

ing conditions [

]. The Great Resignation was widely reported

on in the mainstream media, with coverage often linking to social

media, e.g. “Man Quits His Job With Epic ’Have a Good Life’ Text and

People Are Impressed”

, “Quitting Your Job Never Looked So Fun”

and “Scroll through TikTok to see the real stars of the workplace”

Indeed, media articles often presented the growing popularity of

r/antiwork

, a Reddit community, as emblematic of the signicance

of the Great Resignation6(see Figure 1).

r/antiwork is a subreddit created to discuss worker exploitation,

labour rights and the antiwork movement, irreverently encapsu-

lated by the subreddit’s slogan of “Unemployment for all, not just the

rich!”. Throughout the pandemic, r/antiwork enjoyed continuous

subscriber growth, increasing from 80,000 members at the start of

2020 to over 200,000 in less than a year. However, after becoming

the subject of mainstream media coverage in mid-October 2021,

the number of subscribers increased by over 330,000 within a two

week period – an increase of 57% – making it the fastest growing

subreddit at the time (see grey region from Figure 1). Interactions

with the media continued to shape r/antiwork: Doreen Ford, a long-

time moderator of the subreddit, was interviewed by Fox News

on January 25 2022. The interview was controversial, resulting in

the subreddit briey going private, many members unsubscribing

and a reduction in the rate of subscriber growth throughout 2022.

Numerous redditors observed that there exists a tension between

the moderators, who tend to hold more radical political views, and

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-10/quit-your-job-how-to-

resign-after-covid-pandemic

2https://www.newsweek.com/1639419

3https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/29/style/quit-your-job.html

4https://www.ft.com/content/c7f8fb0e-8f1a-4829-b818-cb9fe90352fa

5https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/

6https://www.ft.com/content/1270ee18-3ee0-4939-98a8-c4f40940e644

arXiv:2210.07796v1 [cs.CY] 14 Oct 2022

Conference acronym ’XX, June 03–05, 2018, Woodstock, NY Alan Medlar, Yang Liu, and Dorota Głowacka

0.0

0.5

1.0

1.5

2.0

2019 2020 2021 2022

Subscribers

(millions)

Figure 1: The number of subscribers to the r/antiwork subreddit from 2019 onwards. The grey box highlights the period from

October 15 2021-January 25 2022.

newer members of the subreddit who are more concerned with

organised labour and reforming the current economic system

Indeed, there are numerous posts from long-term members lament-

ing how the subreddit has changed over time, from discussing how

“society would/could function without unnecessary labor” to users

“posting real and fake text messages of quitting their job”8.

Reddit has been the subject of numerous studies on social media

behaviour. These studies have shown that large numbers of new

users can be disruptive to an online community [

]. They can

impact communication norms [

] and behave in ways that are

harmful to the community [

]. However, even in extreme cases,

like when a subreddit gets defaulted (made a default subreddit

for newly registered Reddit accounts), the community can still

remain high-quality and retain its core character [

]. Other studies

have highlighted how the mainstream media can inuence social

media and the general public. For example, public attention of

COVID-19 on Reddit was mainly driven by media coverage [

]

and negative media articles led to numerous hateful subreddits

being banned by Reddit, including r/TheFappening, r/CoonTown

and r/jailbait. Media coverage has also been shown to have negative

consequences on social media: it can increase problematic online

behaviour [

] and banning subreddits has increased hate speech

elsewhere on Reddit [

]. To our knowledge, however, there are no

studies where a subreddit’s rapid rise was so intertwined with media

coverage and, moreover, where a media event was the catalyst

in its decline. Furthermore, we are unaware of any other studies

specically related to r/antiwork.

To understand how r/antiwork was impacted by media events,

we performed a quantitative analysis of over 300,000 posts and 12

million comments from January 2019 to July 2022. We performed a

time series analysis of users posting and commenting behaviour,

and investigated how user activity on r/antiwork was aected by the

initial media articles in October 2021 and the Fox News interview in

January 2022. Next, we categorised users as light and heavy users to

understand how dierent types of user contribute to the subreddit.

Lastly, we used topic modelling to understand whether the inux of

new users had changed the discourse on r/antiwork, e.g. focusing

more on the topic of quitting their jobs rather than more serious

topics related to the antiwork movement. In summary, we ask the

following research questions:

7https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/sdesxw/comment/huc9wf9/

8https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/q56h/

•RQ1 Subreddit Activity:

How did subreddit activity change

after the increase in subscribers that coincided with coverage

in the mainstream media?

•RQ2 User Types:

How was the posting and commenting be-

haviour of heavy and light users impacted by the growth in

subscribers?

•RQ3 Content Analysis:

Did the inux of new users change

the discourse in terms of the distribution of topics discussed?

In the remainder of this paper, we will answer these research

questions and discuss how our results relate to existing work on

social media analysis.

2 RELATED WORK

In this section, we briey review the work in three research areas

related to this article: the impact of mainstream media on social

media activity, massive growth in social media users, and previous

analyses of Reddit data.

2.1 Impact of Mainstream Media on Social

Media Activity

Mainstream media coverage, such as newspaper articles, television

programmes and radio broadcasts, on political or social topics can

lead to increased awareness of that topic on social media, such

as Reddit. Moreover, elevated interest in an event by mainstream

media can impact the number of users as well as their activity on

social media platforms. For example, Chew et al. [

] and Tausczik

et al. [

] examined the trajectories of activities on social media

(Twitter and web blogs) during the H1N1 pandemic and noticed that

peaks in user activity coincided with major news stories. Similarly,

Gozzi et al. [

] showed that during the COVID-19 pandemic, user

activity on Reddit and searches on Wikipedia were mainly driven

by mainstream media coverage.

The popularity of a topic in mainstream media can also lead

to an increase in moderation activities on social media platforms,

particularly on Reddit. For example, Reddit’s administrative in-

terventions caused by violations of their content policy for toxic

content occurred more frequently as a result of media pressure [

Moreover, mainstream media attention on subreddits with toxic

content further exacerbated the toxicity of their content [

]. Horta

Ribeiro et al. [

] further studied user activity and content toxicity

after r/The_Donald and r/incels were banned due to media-driven

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

10 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载

摘要：

NobodyWantstoWorkAnymore:AnAnalysisofr/antiworkandtheInterplaybetweenSocialandMainstreamMediaduringtheGreatResignationAlanMedlarUniversityofHelsinkiFinlandalan.j.medlar@helsinki.fiYangLiuUniversityofHelsinkiFinlandyang.liu@helsinki.fiDorotaGłowackaUniversityofHelsinkiFinlanddorota.glowacka@helsinki....

展开>> 收起<<

Nobody Wants to Work AnymoreAn Analysis of rantiwork and the Interplay between Social and Mainstream Media during the Great Resignation.pdf

共9页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Nobody Wants to Work AnymoreAn Analysis of rantiwork and the Interplay between Social and Mainstream Media during the Great Resignation

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: