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Matthew Borelli
Kylliki Rytov
ENC 2135
October 8th, 2015
Genre and Interpersonal Connections: Reddit as an Ideal Baseball Community.
A baseball fans dream day would most likely be spent at the ballpark, cheering on their
favorite team with their numerous fellow fans surrounding them as they all enjoy the pleasures of
live baseball. However, many people lose their chance at this dream in the first step: getting to
the game itself. Many hardcore fans dont live near their favorite team, whether theyve been
pulled away for a job or fallen in love with a team across state borders. The most important
question raised by this common scenario pertains to all baseball fans: How should fans make
connections with their fellow fans? The internet is the current best resource for meeting up with
fans over lengthy distances, but there are still many different websites with varying experiences
for fans. It can be difficult deciding which, if any, digital baseball community to join, but the
results of my research show that one website stands out above the rest. Reddit is the ideal digital
community for baseball fans of all teams.
Of course, for people who have never used Reddit before, it seems confusing upon the
first look. Reddit is not just a dedicated baseball website, but actually hosts a collection of
communities, named subreddits, focused on a variety of different topics. Each of these subreddits
is user driven, with a voting system utilized to decide what content is displayed at the top of the
page. For the purposes of baseball, the general subreddit is r/Baseball, a forum for fans of
baseball in general, mostly revolving around Major League Baseball (MLB). As part of this

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community, there are related subreddits that are made for fans of specific teams, such as
r/Nationals for the Washington Nationals and r/MotorCityKitties for the Detroit Tigers. Even
though Reddit has areas for common fans and hardcore fans, what makes it a good community?
To answer that question, we should first take a look at what makes a community a good
community. The important thing to find are the specific qualities that come together to create a
cohesive group. The results of a study released in 1975 makes the picture clearer on what people
want from a community (Blake, Weigl, and Perloff 612). The study covered three principal
qualities of communities: system maintenance and change, relationship, and personal
development (Blake, Weigl, and Perloff 612). While the first of these qualities does not have a
great effect on digital communities, the last two factors matter very much. The relationship
aspect pertains to how people in the community interact with each other, while the personal
development aspect pertains to how an individual and the community interact to further the
individual (Blake, Weigl, and Perloff 612). The results of the study show that people feel as
though their communities are better when these factors are more commonly found within the
community (Blake, Weigl, and Perloff 614). This means that communities that create
interpersonal relationships and work to make individuals better off are superior communities.
However, this study only refers to real life communities, leaving the connection to digital
communities in need of explanation.
Some people may wrongly believe that digital communities are just a replacement for
physical interactions, but those thoughts are not well founded. Digital communities stand on their
own as a complete form of a community. Catherine Ridings and David Gefen describe some of
the main reasons people join online communities in their article Virtual community attraction:
Why people hang out online. Most of these reasons are obvious factors involved in the decision

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process, like making new friendships or finding people who hold a common interest (Ridings
and Gefen 3). However, one of these reasons stands out for not being commonly found within
physical interactions: the exchange of information (Ridings and Gefen 3). Very simply, the
communication of information entices people who have a passion for knowledge to join online
communities and find new facts. Thomas Erickson showcases a similarly underrepresented
function of online communities in his article Social Interaction on the Net: Virtual Community
or Participatory Genre? His article discusses the ways in which online communities act as more
than just communities, but actually become genres themselves because of the conventions found
within. These conventions, such as the rhythm of conversation and the participation of
individual users within the community come together to form a genre that can be used to create
well-functioning digital communities (Erickson 30). These communities also provide a breadth
of information in a similar way to physical communities.
As mentioned previously, many people favor online communities that provide
information. Many of these online communities are prosperous because they bring together many
peoples ideas and thoughts into the public sphere. In principle, there are four main types of
posters within digital communities:
Team players, who draft short advising messages; storytellers, who post less but longer
and very social messages; utility posters, who share knowledge but neglect social
interaction; and all-round talents, who engage in various actions and have average
messages, without standing out in any activity (Moser, Ganley, and Groenewegen 553).
Clearly different members of these communities showcase different kinds of information. In a
conventional sense, utility posters tend to deliver the most knowledge into a community, even if
they do not tend to directly interact with fellow members. The supply of information throughout

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digital communities is critically important to the smaller subset of baseball communities online.
As written in the article Baseball Fans' Reasons for Supporting a Team, Attributions to Team
Performance, and Fan Loyalty" by Chu-Min Liao et al., the important factors of choosing a
baseball team for most people are team image, familiarity with the team, influences of family
and friends, and home team (181). Three of those four factors are directly affected by the flow
of information created by the other users of the community. The team image, how the team
comes across to fans, is expressed by fans of a team within digital communities. Familiarity of
the team directly increases with the amount of information known about them, demonstrating a
positive relationship between team familiarity and the amount of knowledge supplied through
digital communities. Last, the influences of family and friendship matter greatly within digital
communities, considering the great likelihood of becoming friends with fans of a certain team.
These factors, when combined with the previous concepts of an ideal community, show how
digital communities can create lasting connections between fans and their teams.
Of course, it is not just the connection between a fan and the team that matters.
Interpersonal relationships also play a key role in the well-being of a community. As previously
mentioned, baseball fans would love to always be at the game, but that wish is wholly
unrealistic. So how else can fans enjoy games with other people? Sheranne Fairley and B. D.
Tyler discuss an interesting option in their article, Bringing Baseball to the Big Screen: Building
Sense of Community Outside of the Ballpark. The paper is about an experiment where
researchers held an event for fans to come together and watch a game together in a movie theater.
One of the common agreements amongst the fans was that the sense of community created by
a group of fans coming together to watch a game was a positive benefit (265). This sense of
community can also be found within digital communities, many of whom host game threads for

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users to comment on a game live. These game threads act as a way for the users in the
community to come together and experience a game in much the same way that the fans in the
experiment came together and enjoyed a game as a community.
As I have demonstrated in the preceding paragraphs, ideal communities generally share
several traits that assemble together into a functional group. First, there must be an exchange of
information. People within the community should be able to express new ideas and facts to
others easily while sticking to the topic. Secondly, an ideal community will allow people to
create friendships in easy ways. Making interpersonal relationships between other members of a
community is critical because most information is exchanged in dialogue between members.
Finally, an ideal community will have a collection of users who display varying characteristics. If
everyone in the community were the same, new knowledge and information would be hard to
come by, and the lack of differing opinions would lead to an echo chamber with no personal
growth. Having people with these different characteristics livens up a community and allows the
relationships between different types of users to flourish. These representative characteristics of
an ideal community are also found within Reddit, demonstrating its position as the best online
baseball community.
Reddit has a seemingly simple way of
sharing information that includes a complex
set of relationships between other sources of
information. The first form of this clearly
displays itself in full form on the front page
Figure 1: Front page of r/Nationals

of any subreddit. Any user can create a post that shares information that while usually required to
be relevant to the topic of the subreddit, can stretch beyond the bounds into any thoughts said

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user might want to bring up. For example, figure 1 is a screenshot taken of the front page of
r/Nationals that shows the variety of information to be found, ranging from updates of the days
game to posts wishing players, in this case Ian
Desmond (A.K.A. Desi), a happy birthday. However,
not all information shared within the community must
be created on Reddit. In fact, part of Reddits success
on the Internet is that it allows for users to share
outside websites and articles while still hosting a

Figure 2: Diagram of Reddit's connections

(Haralabopoulos, Anagnostopoulos, and Zeadally)

comment section within the subreddit framework. Figure 2 is a simple diagram that shows the
relationships between different social media websites and how information travels between them.
In this diagram, Reddit is in the middle on purpose, as it serves as a link between most other
social media websites, as well as many news and entertainment sites as well. The myriad of
connections between Reddit and other websites leads to Reddit controlling a large section of the
flow of information on the Internet, clearly showing that it fulfills the first requirement of an
ideal community.
Making friendships within an online community is very simple, considering that in this
case, most people already have something in common: a love of baseball. One of the ways
moderators of r/Baseball and the team subreddits facilitate this process is by hosting game
threads. These sections are dedicated to a specific game that is happening live, allowing
members of the community to come together and watch a game. Many jokes are posted within a
game thread, and watching as the users post tense comments in a close situation really enhances
the feeling of the game. Of course, these game threads are very similar to the experiment in the
article from Sheranne Fairley and B.D. Tyler in which they gathered members of a community to

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watch a game together away from the normal setting of a baseball park. In the same way that
people responded positively to watching a game in a theater, many users of Reddit find that
participating in game threads enhances their viewing experience and creates potential
friendships. Therefore, Reddit fulfills the second requirement of an ideal community.
As mentioned earlier, Reddit has communities many sections of baseball fandom, from
casual fans who just love the game to hardcore fans who even follow minor league teams. With
an enormous amount of teams that are within the wingspan of Reddit, the variety of content
throughout all of the different subreddits is staggering. As mentioned earlier, figure 1 displays the
front page of a subreddit. It can relay interesting information ranging from game scores to player
birthdays, as seen within the image. Steven Ovadia discusses Reddits function as a news source,
stating, Because users vote on content, higher quality content often seems to rise to the top of
the page (38). This means that along with acting as a consolidated source of information, the
addition of user votes acts as a quality control system that displays the best and most pertinent
information as high on the page as possible. The effective flow of information corresponds to the
findings of the Chu-Min Liao et al. paper that analyzed why fans come to choose their favorite
baseball team. The factors that were most commonly found amongst fans are mostly directly
impacted by aforementioned flow of information. The team image is dependent on the total
knowledge the community has of the team. Likewise, the familiarity with a team increases as an
individual learns more about a team. Thus, Reddit is clearly shown to meet the third requirement
of an ideal community by relaying a great deal of information.
However, not everybody believes that Reddit is truly the ideal community for baseball
fans. This is fairly obvious due to the multitude of baseball communities on the Internet, many of
which have user bases that dont overlap with Reddit. Clearly, there is some quality of Reddit

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that certain people oppose. From what I have seen within these other communities, it seems clear
where this problem exists: Reddit allows too many outsiders in the community who disrupt the
regular flow of information. These outside users, known as trolls, can cause temporary havoc
within a community by disrupting the flow of a conversation. Trolls definitively have a negative
effect within a community, as discussed by Christopher Hopkinson in his article, Face Effects of
Verbal Antagonism. He discusses many of the rhetorical moves that users utilize in arguments
between members of a group and members outside of that group. Many of these dont stay within
the subject of debate, including the following: altercasting, where a persons arguments are
dismissed due to affiliation with members of a different group; straw man, in which a user
purposely misrepresents an opponents views and argues against it; and irony and parody, where
a user attempts to signal primarily that the opponent is being ridiculed, and therefore not taken
seriously (Face Effects of Verbal Antagonism 74-77). These arguments shift the focus away
from the actual topic at hand to personal attacks. Since Reddit has an increased amount of these
interactions due to its open format, many people believe it is actually an inferior community to
the varied alternatives found on the Internet.
The previously mentioned view of trolls within a community as a definitively negative
aspect is an oversimplified view of the relationships between different types of users. Of course,
I concede that many of the effects caused by trolls are negative and harm the community by
derailing the flow of conversation. However, there are also positive secondary effects that are
created by responses to trolls that actually create a positive benefit for the community.
Christopher Hopkinson agrees with that sentiment in a different article, Trolling in Online
Discussions: From Provocation to Community-Building. In this article, he states, In summary,
the practice of trolling helps to create both antagonistic and supportive networks. Far from being

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a purely destructive type of behavior, it plays a significant role in building communities and
strengthening bonds among community members (Trolling in Online Discussions 23). The
supportive networks described in the quote refer to relationships between members of the
community who come together in order to fight back against the efforts of a troll. While not
entirely positive, trolls still allow the members of a community to form a tighter web, meaning
that Reddit should not lose its spot as an ideal community because of them.
Reddit is clearly the ideal digital community for baseball fans of all types. It allows new
fans to learn about the game and follow along better, while more hardcore users can create
friendships with like-minded members. Reddit meets the main requirements of an ideal
community as well, by acting as an efficient hub for different types of communication, including
its use of various genres to relay these messages. No other website on the Internet has this potent
combination of features, all of them falling short in at least one of the areas due to their various
limitations. While they still function well and are enjoyable, it is clear that Reddit is the current
champion of baseball communities.

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Works Cited
Blake, Brian F., Karl Weigl, and Robert Perloff. "Perceptions of the Ideal Community." Journal
of Applied Psychology 60.5 (1975): 612-615. Print.
Chu-Min Liao, Ling-Wen Huang,Yu-Wen Ho, Wen-Chun Yu, Chia-Hsiu Hsu, Kuo-Fong Pan.
"Baseball Fans' Reasons for Supporting a Team, Attributions to Team Performance,
and Fan Loyalty." Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology 29 (2007): 181-182. Print.
Fairley, Sheranne, and B. D. Tyler. "Bringing Baseball to the Big Screen: Building Sense of
Community Outside of the Ballpark" Journal of Sport Management 26.3 (2012): 258270. Print.
Haralabopoulos, Giannis, Ioannis Anagnostopoulos, and Sherali Zeadally. "Lifespan and
Propagation of Information in on-Line Social Networks: A Case Study Based on
Reddit." Journal of Network and Computer Applications 56 (2015): 88-100. Print.
Hopkinson, Christopher. "Face Effects of Verbal Antagonism in Online Discussions." Brno
Studies in English 40.1 (2014): 65-87. Print.
---. "Trolling in Online Discussions: From Provocation to Community-Building." Brno Studies
in

English 39.1 (2013): 5-25. Print.

Moser, Christine, Dale Ganley, and Peter Groenewegen. "Communicative Genres as Organising
Structures in Online Communities of Team Players and Storytellers." Information
Systems Journal 23.6 (2013): 551-67. Print.
Ovadia, Steven. "More than just Cat Pictures: Reddit as a Curated News Source." Behavioral &
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Sciences Librarian 34.1 (2015): 37-40. Print.

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Ridings, C. M., and D. Gefen. "Virtual Community Attraction: Why People Hang Out
Online." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10.1 (2004): 1-20. Web.
Thomas Erickson. 1997. Social interaction on the net: virtual community or participatory
genre? SIGGROUP Bull. 18, 2 (August 1997), 26-31.