Signaling the Intent to Change Online Communities: A Case From a Reddit Gaming Community

This study builds on existing research about churn and community movement, examining if language use on Reddit can be used to determine if people signal their intent to relocate to a new community before they actually do so. Using a computational and semantic approach, we studied the subreddits for the game series Fallout at the time Fallout 76 (FO76) was released to see if the users of the Fallout 4 (FO4) subreddit signaled how they would react to the new subreddit. The main difference we found was that those who stay in the FO4 subreddit or use both subreddits on average post more often and create longer posts than those who move to the FO76 subreddit or leave. This adds further evidence to support theories about community as communication, and we suggest this finding can help online community managers identify which users may be about to leave the community, aiding retention and the overall health of the community.