Reddit as a Discourse Community

Hello everyone!

So, for my rhetoric class, I had to write a blog post on Reddit as a discourse community. Since I actually run a blog, I thought it would be funny to actually post it. Hope you enjoy!

Today's subject is the web blog "The Concept of Discourse Community: Some Recent Personal History" by John M. Swales, and the question of whether or not Reddit is a discourse community, accompanied by a blog post "What is Reddit" by an unnamed college student. Of course, to make that decision, we must first define a discourse community. In paragraph three of the personal history section, Swales refers to a Wikipedia article in his post and says that a discourse community is "a group of people who share a set of discourses, understood as basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating about their goals."

Now, let's define Reddit. Reddit is an online platform that allows users to read, post, comment, upvote and downvote, and otherwise interact with each other regarding a multitude of different concepts. This is moderated, but not fact checked, leading to a lot of misinformation. A college student wrote a blog post on Reddit, and described it as "diverse," which is accurate (What is Reddit). There are several thousand 'sub-reddits' within Reddit, that help with the search and classification of certain topics, such as the 'no sleep' sub, which focuses on fictional horror stories. In some areas, Reddit has professionals comment on certain things, such as tattoos, or dentists. However, due to the public nature of the forum, it is not guaranteed that you will get good information.

Based on these two definitions, I believe that Reddit is in fact, a discourse community. In fact, it may be several communities within one. They share goals, knowledge, values, information, and more. However, unlike other discourse communities, Reddit is known to be very toxic, causing users to argue with each other. Therefore, even though it is technically a discourse community, it is not a good one.

Bibliography

Swales, J. M. (2017). The concept of discourse community: Some recent personal history. Composition Forum. 37, (Fall). https://www.compositionforum.com/issue/37/swales-retrospective.phpLinks to an external site.

What is Reddit? (n.d.). from Yeah, I’ve Reddit: Why and How Reddit is Becoming the World’s Most Influential Discourse Community