Practicum - Kim

As with any other online community, the online LGBT community contains people with various different attitudes and opinions. Back on reddit I noticed a few more things about this type of social network. I originally thought it would be hard to keep track of specific members on these forums since they are pretty much composed of pages upon pages of posts and comments. I soon realized this wasn't the case when I was seeing recurring usernames who often post about related topics within LGBT, or from usernames that are directly connected to another LGBT site, blog, or newspaper article.

There are also moderators for the forums, which I think is important on any user-generated site, but especially in a community like LGBT where controversy could easily be aroused. Another aspect of these online communities that I've found interesting is a member count. Although my ethnography is supposed to be based on "minority groups," these specialized sites employ this count to show its subscribers that even though they may feel outcasted in society, at home, or in school, they are certainly not alone in their online community. Reddit specifically tells the viewers of the site that they have "24,974 fabulous readers."

Lastly, reddit encourages a sense of community with a voting system in which members can decide what content is good (up arrow) and what's junk (down arrow). Links that receive community approval are moved up on the pages, so the front page is constantly changing and being filled with new and interesting links.