Online forums provide rich environments where users may post questions and comments about different topics. Understanding how people behave in online forums may shed light on the fundamental mechanisms by which collective thinking emerges in a group of individuals, but it has also important practical applications, for instance to improve user experience, increase engagement or automatically identify bullying. Importantly, the datasets generated by the activity of the users are often openly available for researchers, in contrast to other sources of data in computational social science. In this survey, we map the main research directions that arose in recent years and focus primarily on the most popular platform, Reddit. We distinguish and categorise research depending on their focus on the posts or on the users, and point to different types of methodologies to extract information from the structure and dynamics of the system. We emphasize the diversity and richness of the research in terms of questions and methods, and suggest future avenues of research.

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Reddit 剖析：学术研究概述

在线论坛提供了丰富的环境，用户可以在其中发布有关不同主题的问题和评论。了解人们在在线论坛中的行为方式可能会阐明集体思维在一群人中出现的基本机制，但它也具有重要的实际应用，例如改善用户体验、增加参与度或自动识别欺凌行为。重要的是，与计算社会科学中的其他数据来源相比，由用户活动生成的数据集通常可供研究人员公开使用。在本次调查中，我们绘制了近年来出现的主要研究方向，主要关注最受欢迎的平台 Reddit。我们根据他们对帖子或用户的关注对研究进行区分和分类，并指出从系统的结构和动态中提取信息的不同类型的方法。我们强调研究在问题和方法方面的多样性和丰富性，并建议未来的研究途径。