AoIR 2025

Mapping Fandom Ruptures: A Case Study of Taylor Swift Fandom Practices on Reddit

Samantha Vilkins, Axel Bruns, Sebastian F.K. Svegaard

• 16 Oct. 2025 – Paper presented at the 2025 Association of Internet Researchers conference, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro

Presentation Slides

Abstract

Introduction

As research access to major social media platforms has become increasingly restricted, growing attention has turned to Reddit as a valuable alternative for studying online communities. This follows rising traffic and all-time user activity on the platform in 2024 (Reddit, 2024). Reddit has grown in recognition as a space online for fandom and community engagement: from long-standing spaces as a main source for fan reaction by journalists (Burt, 2025) to pop-up spaces in response to current events (Honderich & Wendling, 2024), and a concentrated, strategic and successful push to become the home of organic sports fandom online (Bradley, 2024). 

It would be a mistake to attribute this rise entirely to the downfall of Twitter/X. Proferes et al. (2021) have noted that while Twitter was once a “model organism” (Tufekci, 2014) for research, Reddit is increasingly filling this role alongside additional advantages of a “qualitatively and quantitatively more expansive dataset” (Proferes et al., 2021, p.1). More recently, interest in network analyses of expansive Reddit activity have grown (Proferes et al., 2021), generated from metrics such as user co-comment networks at various levels (Baowaly, Kibirige and Singh, 2022), reply networks (Rohde, Liu and Rees, 2023) or sharing of posts across communities (Sawicki, 2023). This paper furthers previous research in community analysis on Reddit, presenting an application of the novel practice mapping methodology to studying Taylor Swift fandom communities on Reddit. We demonstrate how this approach can reveal patterns about user behavior that are left less clear via direct engagement metrics and data from other platforms.

Practice Mapping and Practices on Reddit

Practice mapping (Bruns et al., 2024) is a method which, unlike traditional network analysis, connects and clusters users by the similarity of their actions online rather than direct interactions. Practice mapping also enables visualization of a combination of actions at once, as opposed to single-mode networks such as reply or co-comment graphs. Therefore, a number of decisions must be made by the researcher regarding what practices and units to analyze, and how to weight the various inputs. This approach allows for not only a richer view of community behaviors in one graph, but more flexibility in which aspects of activity to focus on. However, this flexibility puts greater onus on the researcher to truly understand the context of their dataset both in
the selection of practices and the conversion of them into countable metrics for analysis. 

Translating practice mapping for use on Reddit data requires significant conceptual and contextual understanding of the affordances of the platform. Of significant importance is the structure of subreddits, where there are different community practices, not only due to cultural incentives but because of moderation rules that can vary between subreddits. Across and within subreddits, users disagree about governance styles and values (Weld, Zhang & Althoff, 2022), and rather than one platform community culture, users belong to largely transient communities each with “a very specific shared set of languages and conventions, rules, expectations, and rituals” (Robards, 2018, p. 193). Subreddits which may ostensively look to be centered on the same topic of discussion may hold very different user behavior and content in practice, with both user history and local convergence playing a part in maintaining these distinctions over time (Rajadesingan, Resnick & Budak 2020).

Swifties and Anti-Swifties on Reddit

Understanding the clear differences between subreddit practices is particularly important to our dataset. Our case study examines Taylor Swift fandom communities on Reddit, comprising of just over one year of data (1 September 2023 to 30 September 2024) from eleven subreddits: eight dedicated to Swift and three general subreddits filtered for Swift content. Our selection purposefully includes a variety of communities, including mainstream fan community r/taylorswift (3.2 million members at time of download) to relationship-focused groups (r/travisandtaylor, 116k) and music discussion groups (r/popheads, 2.4m); two of the subreddits are explicitly anti-fandom subreddits.

This timespan held significant ruptures within Swift fandom, stretching from Swift’s call for voter registration in September 2023 to her Democrat presidential endorsement in September 2024. This year also marks the rise in public consciousness of her relationship with celebrity footballer Travis Kelce sparking controversy and even conspiratorial thinking (see e.g. Pengally, 2024). While Swift’s relationships -- and, to a lesser extent, her politics -- had inspired community conflict and even new subreddit creation in the past (Driessen 2022a, 2022b), none reached the ongoing magnitude and engagement of those in 2023-24. These events generated not only substantial discussion across Reddit, but fan and anti-fan fragmentation, creating a rich case study for community analysis.

Fan studies literature has established that both fandom and anti-fandom (Sandvoss, 2019) represent powerful drivers for community formation (see Gray, 2003; Jones, 2015; Barnes, 2022). Anti-fan and alternative identities and communities can be complex, existing from both inside and outside traditional fan spaces, and often leading with emotional attachment in a “feels culture” (Stein, 2015). This is clear in the origins of the dedicated Swift subreddits, where one initial all-encompassing r/TaylorSwift subreddit started in 2010 was first joined by an additional dedicated r/GaylorSwift for “queer readings, themes, and motifs in her work and public persona” in 2018 (Reddit, 2025). In this affect-driven environment, identifying practices of fandom, including similarities and differences between seemingly similar or related subsets of fandom provides new insights into the functions of online communities.

Measuring Practices: A Multi-Level Framework

Our adaptation of practice mapping for Reddit data required developing metrics that capture activities on the platform at multiple levels. These were informed by extensive exploratory research phases consisting of both qualitative observations and traditional network analysis with the data.

A short summary of the included practice metrics is:

Extensive ethnographic observations were relied upon for initial scoping and ongoing context and sense-making checks. We constructed a timeline of Swift’s major moments during the time, and corresponding changes in activity across the subreddits for comparison. This revealed a clear reactive interplay across Reddit, as existing communities fractured into new ones with different perspectives on moderation and content focus.

Further observations informed variety in the practices selected. Other subreddits and their users were often referred to with specific pejoratives, marking something to later look for systematically in text data. Topological differences between massive, structured ‘megathreads’ for focused discussion and shorter conversational threads led to extensive reworking of thread structure and user dominance metrics. Exploratory data work with traditional social network analysis was also foundational in our approach, working with comment and submission patterns, URL and domain-level sharing, and cross-posting, and observing differences across users, individual threads and subreddit-level behaviors. Clear deviations, for example, in the overall visualization between user co-comment networks at the subreddit level versus the thread level led to an increased multi-level focus in our analysis.

This multi-level approach captures the complex interplays between platform affordances, community norms and individual practices that characterize activity on Reddit. This aims to recognize both the impact of subreddit-level and thread-level governance as well as individual patterns of behavior, as recognized in the literature (Robards, 2018; Rajadesingan, Resnick & Budak, 2020; Weld, Zhang & Althoff, 2022) and in our ethnographic investigations. It allows us to identify not only what users do within individual subreddits but how they adapt their practices as they move between communities – revealing patterns of rupture and continuity in communities.

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