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While cross-partisan conversations are central to a vibrant deliberative democracy, these conversations are hard to have, especially amidst unprecedented levels of partisan animosity we observe today. We report on a qualitative study of 17 US residents who engage with outpartisans on Reddit to understand what they look for in these interactions, and the strategies they adopt. We find that users have multiple, sometimes contradictory expectations of these conversations, ranging from deliberative discussions to entertainment and banter. In aiming to foster 'good' cross-partisan discussions, users make strategic choices on which subreddits to participate in, who to engage with and how to talk to outpartisans, often establishing common ground, complimenting, and remaining dispassionate in their interactions. Further, contrary to offline settings where knowing more about outpartisan interlocutors help manage disagreements, on Reddit, users look to actively learn as little as possible about them for fear that such information may bias their interactions. However, through design probes, we find that users are actually open to knowing certain kinds of information about their interlocutors, such as non-political subreddits that they both participate in, and to having that information made visible to their interlocutors. However, making other information visible, such as the other subreddits that they participate in or their past comments, though potentially humanizing, raises concerns around privacy and misuse of that information for personal attacks especially among women and minority groups. Finally, we identify important challenges and opportunities in designing to improve online cross-partisan interactions in today's hyper-polarized environment. 

Research on online political communication has primarily focused on content in explicitly political spaces. In this work, we set out to determine the amount of political talk missed using this approach. Focusing on Reddit, we estimate that nearly half of all political talk takes place in subreddits that host political content less than 25% of the time. In other words, cumulatively, political talk in non-political spaces is abundant. We further examine the nature of political talk and show that political conversations are less toxic in non-political subreddits. Indeed, the average toxicity of political comments replying to a out-partisan in non-political subreddits is less than even the toxicity of co-partisan replies in explicitly political subreddits. 

The past decade in the US has been one of the most politically polarizing in recent memory. Ordinary Democrats and Republicans fundamentally dislike and distrust each other, even when they agree on policy issues. This increase in hostility towards opposing party supporters, commonly called affective polarization, has important ramifications that threaten democracy. Political science research suggests that at least part of this polarization stems from Democrats' misperceptions about Republicans' political views and vice-versa. Therefore, in this work, drawing on insights from political science and game studies research, we designed an online casual game that combines the relaxed, playful nonpartisan norms of casual games with corrective information about party supporters' political views that are often misperceived. Through an experiment, we found that playing the game significantly reduces negative feelings toward outparty supporters among Democrats, but not Republicans. It was also effective in improving willingness to talk politics with outparty supporters. Further, we identified psychological reactance as a potential mechanism that affects the effectiveness of depolarization interventions. Finally, our analyses suggest that the game versions with political content were rated to be just as fun to play as a game version without any political content suggesting that, contrary to popular belief, people do like to mix politics and play. 

Online communities about similar topics may maintain very different norms of interaction. Past research identifies many processes that contribute to maintaining stable norms, including self-selection, pre-entry learning, post-entry learning, and retention. We analyzed political subreddits that had distinctive, stable levels of toxic comments on Reddit, in order to identify the relative contribution of these four processes. Surprisingly, we find that the largest source of norm stability is pre-entry learning. That is, newcomers' first comments in these distinctive subreddits differ from those same people's prior behavior in other subreddits. Through this adjustment, they nearly match the toxicity level of the subreddit they are joining. We also show that behavior adjustments are community-specific and not broadly transformative. That is, people continue to post toxic comments at their previous rates in other political subreddits. Thus, we conclude that in political subreddits, compatible newcomers are neither born nor made– they make local adjustments on their own.