Thrones Related Subreddits

Ever since the introduction of fandom communities within the online space, people now have the potential to interact even more frequently with other people with the same interest. For this case study, the virtual community I decided to focus on is the Game Of Thrones fandom community on Reddit. Specifically, I participated in various Game Of Thrones discussions by exploring the specific subreddits: /r/GameOfThrones, /r/HBOGameOfThrones, /r/ASOIAF, /r/FreeFolk, and other Game Of Thrones related subreddits. In this paper, I will argue that the subreddits dedicated to Game Of Thrones fosters a gifting economy model. However, because it is an interest-based community, these subreddits, in actuality, lack in community diversity.

II. Method

The first piece of evidence that proves this claim is the fact that these subreddits are constantly active and users are very adept to showing their knowledge through “quality” content and discussion. According to Rheingold, it is as simple as throwing out the question and someone in the community will know the answer. Rheingold argues that users contribute to answering because users can have the potential to gain symbolic prestige among virtual peers. This concept of asking-and-answering can be further extrapolated to even just posting a “quality” post or comment. While some posts on the subreddits are posing questions for the community, some are simply displaying their own knowledge of Game Of Thrones by creating good content. For instance, when observing /r/FreeFolk, one of the very top post within the past 24 hours was an extensive fan theory discussing the possibilities of a character’s fate in the future season. This post in particular was several paragraphs long, text heavy, and had extensive proof from the prior seasons that justified the theory’s possibility. These subreddit participants understand that in order to gain “karma”, their peers in the community need to upvote their content. It is widely known that it is a social norm/value that everyone wants to gather as much karma as possible. Contrastingly, in order to test this theory, I created a low quality, copycat meme post that had been circling the subreddits for quite a long time. As predicted, my post only received a 47% upvote rate and did not even reach the ‘rising’ post tab. In this instance, my post, as evaluated by the community, added no value to the subreddit and did not deserve to be awarded. In a positive sense, the community continues to only