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Residents of communities increasingly rely on geographically focused groups on online social media platforms to access local information. These local groups have the potential to enhance the quality of life in communities by helping residents learn about their communities, connect with neighbors and local organizations, and identify important local issues. Moderators of online community groups—typically untrained volunteers—are key actors in these spaces. However, they are also put in a tenuous position, having to manage the groups while simultaneously navigating desires of platforms, rapidly evolving user practices, and the increasing politicization of local issues. In this paper, we explicate the visions of local community groups put forward by Facebook, Reddit, and NextDoor in their corporate discourse and ask: How do these platforms describe local community groups, particularly in reference to ideal communication and community engagement that occurs within them, and how do they position volunteer moderators to help realize these ideals? Through a qualitative thematic analysis of 849 company documents published between 2012 and 2023, we trace how each company rhetorically positions these spaces as what we refer to as a “local platformized utopias.” We examine how this discourse positions local volunteer moderators, the volunteer labor-force of civic actors that constructs, governs, and grows community groups. We discuss how these three social media companies motivate moderators to do this free, value-building labor through the promise of civic virtue; simultaneously obscuring unequal burdens of moderation labor and failing to address the inequalities of access to voice and power in online life. 

The social media industry has begun more prominently positioning itself as a vehicle for tapping into local community. Facebook offers hundreds of region-specific community groups, proudly touting these in nation-wide commercials. Reddit has hundreds of subreddits focused on specific states, cities, and towns. And Nextdoor encourages users to sign up and “Get the most out of your neighborhood.” In these locally oriented digital spaces, users interact, discuss community issues, and share information about what is happening around them. Volunteer moderators with localized knowledge are important agents in the creation, maintenance, and upkeep of these digital spaces. And, as we show, Facebook, Reddit, and Nextdoor create strategic communication to guide this localized volunteer moderator labor to realize specific goals within these spaces. In this work, we ask: “What are the promises the social media industry make about local community groups, and how do they position volunteer moderators to help realize those promises?” Through a qualitative content analysis of 849 documents produced by Facebook, Reddit, and NextDoor, we trace how platforms position their version of local community as slightly different utopian spaces, and channel volunteer moderator labor both through direct instruction and appeals to civic virtue. 

This article offers a systematic analysis of 727 manuscripts that used Reddit as a data source, published between 2010 and 2020. Our analysis reveals the increasing growth in use of Reddit as a data source, the range of disciplines this research is occurring in, how researchers are getting access to Reddit data, the characteristics of the datasets researchers are using, the subreddits and topics being studied, the kinds of analysis and methods researchers are engaging in, and the emerging ethical questions of research in this space. We discuss how researchers need to consider the impact of Reddit’s algorithms, affordances, and generalizability of the scientific knowledge produced using Reddit data, as well as the potential ethical dimensions of research that draws data from subreddits with potentially sensitive populations.