Biography
Adrienne Massanari is a communication scholar whose central body of work is specifically about Reddit, making her one of the most-cited academics studying the platform's culture and governance. Her research examines how Reddit's design, community norms, and moderation practices shape user behaviour, including the platform's capacity to host harassment.
Her 2015 book 'Participatory Culture, Community, and Play: Learning from Reddit,' published by Peter Lang, is a digital ethnography based on fieldwork conducted in the early 2010s. It examines how Reddit's communities form, play, and self-govern, and how the site's structure encourages particular kinds of participation and identity. The book is among the earliest sustained academic studies devoted entirely to Reddit.
Massanari is best known for the peer-reviewed article '#Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit's algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures,' published in New Media & Society in 2017. The article analyses how Reddit's voting algorithm, design choices, and lax governance combined to enable harassment campaigns, and it has become one of the most influential academic accounts of how platform architecture can support toxic communities.
Her work is frequently invoked in debates over whether Reddit's design and hands-off moderation philosophy bear responsibility for harassment that originated or thrived on the site. By focusing on the interplay between algorithm, governance, and culture, Massanari helped frame how scholars and journalists understand Reddit as a sociotechnical system rather than a neutral venue.