Ethnography Results, Week 6

Ethnography Results - Week 6

This week I wanted to try a different section of Reddit to compare it with the Science section. Before I switch sections I would like to re-state the observations I have made from my time spent in the Science section. From observing several users who have posted popular content that has made it to the front page of the Science section I took note of their commenting and posting tendencies. I noticed several things which include

• most science articles were lengthy and would require at least a couple of minutes to read and comprehend. 
• Users that posted popular material were not frequent posters in the Science section.
• Popular comments made in popular posts in the Science were usually not lengthy.
• Most users that posted popular material commenting in other sections more frequently than the Science section.

I think most of the above bullets relate to how long the article or post would take to read. Most users on a large site with a ton of viewing material do not like to spend all of their time reading a single article or lengthy comment. I want to check if this is true for a section that doesn't have material that will consume a lot of time viewing. I'm going to do some observing of the 'Funny' section.

What I plan to do in the Funny section is check what sections the users who have posted front page material usually post in. I want to see if this matches the characteristics of the users I checked out that post in the Science section.

I took five users who posted content that made it to the front page and recorded different sections that they have posted in. The following is the data that was collected.

User 1

• Pics x 8
• Funny
• Videos
• Animation
• WTF x 2
• Music
• Politics
• Technology
• History

User 2

•  Funny
• Pics x  6
• Technology x 3
• Worldnews x 3
• WTF
• Music

User 3

• Funny x 9
• Askreddit
• Pics x 3 
• Music x 4

User 4

• Funny x 4
• Reddit.com x 2
• Security
• Pics
• History
• Google

User 5

• Funny x 7
• Pics x 2
• WTF x 6
• offbeat x 4

From this data is appears to be a lot more consistent than the users I viewed in the Science section.Many of the users post a lot of stuff in the Funny section. I think it is also worth noting that a lot of the other sections that these five users post in have very short content as well, such as the very popular 'Pics' section. I think that this example  shows further that most users spend their time with short content. From the science section I think that comments work the same way. I will probably have a look at the comments users make in the Funny section next week but that will be important to observe to go beside this study.

From the results it may seem like the 'Pics' section would have been the easiest section to study that has short content because the content is only a picture. I did not choose this section because I wanted to look at content that could have the possibility to be an article as well which takes more time to view than the average picture.