Community Resilience: Quantifying the Disruptive Effects of Sudden Spikes in Activity within Online Communities

BSTRACT Online communities often experience some form of crisis. Regardless of whether these communities are small groups or entire platforms, the ability to handle disruptions during volatile periods signifies the resilience of a community. In this paper, we analyze the effects of a specific type of crisis event on Reddit: sudden spikes in attention received by a community due to a post from the subreddit hitting r/popular—the default feed that aggregates the most popular content on Reddit. Our results show that r/popular is a source of potential disruptions due to the higher number of comments, authors, and especially removed comments found compared to threads that do not reach r/popular. When looking at r/popular’s effects across subreddits, large communities’ commenting and posting behaviors were less impacted by r/popular threads compared to smaller communities. However, similar-sized subreddits had substantial variations in how their commenting and posting activities were influenced by an r/popular thread. Understanding the causal factors behind these differences has implications for online governance, as well as fostering resilient and healthy communities.