Thesis Thesis on differences between traditional drug use sites (BL) and large emerged sites (Reddit)

Although the notion of community in the online sphere has been criticised due to the lack of physicality and sometimes low levels of commitment (e.g. Fernback, 2007), there are strong arguments to support the applicability of the community label when describing online group interactions that are persistent, involve shared norms and have real effects on the behaviour of their participants (Ladegaard, 2017). Through interviews with members of an illicit drugs discussion forum, Bilgrei (2017) shows how membership in and the social processes of an online community are crucial factors in building trust in the illicit drugs information shared between anonymous individuals. Similar findings of community-based trust on online platforms can be found in the literature on illicit drug markets (Bancroft et al., 2019) and licit market platforms (Boyd, 2006).
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arrall said:
We may be able to use this paper to help us develop strategies to better execute our ongoing expansion to Reddit with the recent opening of /r/bluelight.
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For sure you could!!

“On Bluelight, the only reason to register an account is to participate in illicit drugs discussion. On reddit however, people register accounts to follow a broad range of topics and may thus be exposed to illicit drugs content accidentally, e.g. via the front page or a ‘cross-post’ from another subreddit. Reddit has also implemented a number of platform features which makes it easy and convenient to participate passively (‘lurking’), e.g. the option to subscribe to a subreddit to receive content updates and the voting system which is a type of participation that does not require any substantial contribution or effort. These and other factors may attract a higher number of participants to illicit drug discussions, but are also likely to also result in a higher prevalence of casual participation – i.e. participating in fewer discussion, posting fewer comments and being active for shorter periods of time – than on a platform like Bluelight. This means that the illicit drugs discussions on reddit has the potential to impact a greater number of people, but it also means that notion of community on reddit is likely be more diffuse as the participants do not necessarily “share a concern or passion” (Wenger, 2004, p. 4) or have an “intrinsic desire to communicate” (Eysenbach et al., 2004, p. 3) to the same degree. The great numbers of users in some illicit drugs subreddits may also contribute to this diffusion or dilution of the community notion.
Bluelight explicitly promotes an agenda of harm reduction and drug education, which is likely to be reflected in the discussions on the Bluelight forums. On reddit there is no such site-wide agenda, as subreddits are fully autonomous. Thus, a higher degree of variation can be expected with respect to the norms and values, and consequently practices, characterising individual subreddits (Massanari, 2016).”

Just to add this in regards to community which I feel is important for harm reduction.

“The community is “the group of people for whom the domain is relevant, the quality of the relationships among members, and the definition of the boundary between the inside and the outside” (Wenger, 2004, p. 3). This encompasses not only the individual members, but also the structure of their social interactions and relationships. The community dimension is what situates the development of knowledges and practices within a social environment, as the community members participate in sustained, mutual engagement with the domain and “develop a shared understanding of their domain and an approach to their practice” (Wenger et al., 2002, p. 34-35). The literature stresses the importance of a high level of regular and continuous mutual engagement for the development of community bonds (Murillo, 2008; Wenger, 1998). In a successful community of practice, these community bonds are characterised by voluntary participation, reciprocity, community-wide participation and trust (Wenger et al., 2002, p. 36-37). With this type of community structure, all members can contribute equally to the fluid development and dissemination of practices, although there may be a group of ‘core’ members who are foundational in defining the activities of the community and bringing the remaining users together (Murillo, 2008).”
 
arrall said:
There's also a ton of misinformation and downright terrible advice on there from what I've noticed.
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Yep.

I think it's the age issue. /r/drugs is supposed to be 18+ but its not enforced whatsoever, so you end up seeing 16 year olds with little experience themselves giving drug advice to 15 year olds. Then nobody really chimes in to correct bad advice. The cycle continues and this bad information gets repeated down the line. Not good.
 
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I feel his reference to "folk medicine" is inaccurate.

folk med·i·cine
Learn to pronounce
noun

  1. treatment of disease or injury based on tradition, especially on oral tradition, rather than on modern scientific practice, and often utilizing indigenous plants as remedies.



For one, where are the non folk researchers looking to attempt to identify and understand new substances and banned substances, two how legit is non "folk medicine" as its got a sketchy present and very sketchy past. What % of modern medications came from plants.. up to 50% How many times do we perform much better than the non "folkies"... well we predicted the opiate crisis years before they had an inkling of a clue. Many of us have repeatedly presented the best ways to deal with it and they continue to cause mass death. You can throw law enforcements approach to drugs and current drug rehabilitation in the folk approach as well.

How are we being called out for being unscientific?
 
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Citing Keane (2003), they argue that the notion of illicit drugs harm reduction is an expression of ideological power as the power to define what these harms are does not come ‘from below’, i.e. from the people who are involved with these drugs but from ‘above’, i.e. from authoritative institutional discourses. In their analysis of ‘harm reduction from below’ on online platforms, they instead suggest a notion of doing drugs well based on the Aristotelian concept of phronesis.
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I always favored wellness promotion
 
@Buzz Lightbeer

I'm not joking.. have made a few posts about this in staff forums and others.

its coincidental but was just looking at this today as well

Foucauldian discourse analysis - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

A large portion of our conscience thinking is done verbally. Really language shapes and limits our ability to think and perform mentally and can easily be used to manipulate.
 
MsDiz said:
“For example, one study found ten times as many active users in a small selection of subreddits than on the entire Bluelight discussion forum (Adams et al., 2019).”

Will read this over the next few days.
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Been awhile.. :) Glad to see you around.

-GC
 
Reddit is full of young and inexperienced drug users. That's my experience. It's like a bunch of teenagers who are just getting into drugs. Not everyone but certainly a trend.

Bluelight feels a lot more.. Senior. Way more knowledge, and more maturity in sharing that knowledge. Also there are lots of people here I would entirely trust the opinion of without further research(not that I would!)..I can't say that about any reddit subs/users.
 
Cant say much about Reddit site been there a couple of times.What i can say about BL though is there are some seriously smart academic folk here on the forums.Folk who know chemistry studied it quite thoroughly who with their knowledge teach others unkowingly more about how things work.Then you have the folk through all their struggles give advice about different drug scenarios ...they been there ...this is also invaluable to folk who dont know....unkowingly and probably saving ppls lives.Why would one go anywhere else except BL.And then there is the friendships formed some over many years...its fkn priceless...imho
 
As mentioned previously, a commonly cited rule of thumb within cyberculture research states that only 10% of the user base on a given platform contributes actively and that the remaining 90% simply ‘lurks’, i.e. observers passively (van Mierlo, 2014).
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p97

Interesting, as it correlates almost exactly to the rates commonly claimed for "born leaders"
 
I downloaded this. From the outset it looks really detailed, although I would be interested to see some analysis on some major harm reduction room within the Discord space and Dread on the darknet. There’s a vast array of groups in social media and groups within social services and government which host discussion or articles to harm reduction as well. Filter Magazine is an example in Canada.

The majority of communal information is going to be drawn from social media and journalistic ventures like so. This is really cool, but I’d like to see a counter piece on that other side of it all.
 
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