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Jeremy Foote

@jeremy@hci.social

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Assistant professor of Communication at Purdue University. I mostly study online communities using computational methods, including trace data, agent-based modeling, and network analysis.

Member of the Community Data Science Collective (https://communitydata.science/)

#commodon
#computationalSocialScience
#ABM
#onlineCommunities

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13 Posts

Joined November 05, 2022

Website:

https://jeremydfoote.com

GitHub:

https://github.com/jdfoote

Collective:

https://communitydata.science

Jeremy Foote @jeremy@hci.social

· 8mo ago

A few weeks back I gave a talk at Stanford about some of our work on generative AI in the online social world.

The video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IH-hRdNMIq0

Preprints of the work are at:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10754
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20100

Stanford CS547 HCI Seminar | Winter 2026 | LLM Chatbots in the Online Social World

Jeremy Foote @jeremy@hci.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

This is a set of software tools designed to do conversational AI field experiments. It recruits and consents Reddit users, assigns them to conditions, manages and store their conversations with chatbots, and tracks their public behavior before and after the intervention. This allows researchers to track longer-term changes to behavior in a real-life setting.

Jeremy Foote @jeremy@hci.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

The paper describing the tool and making an argument for its benefits (and delineating some of the risks and drawbacks to this approach) is out in Computational Communication Research: https://www.aup-online.com/content/journals/10.5117/CCR2026.2.5.FOOT The open source GitHub project is at: https://github.com/jdfoote/Reddit-Conversation-Laboratory We (me, Loizos Bitsikokos, Hitesh Goel, and Deepak Kumar) hope that this paper and library make it much easier for others to pursue this kind of research. Contributions and pull requests to the project are very welcome!

aup-online.com

Reddit Conversation Laboratory: Field experiments with conversational AI agents | Amsterdam University Press Journals Online

Abstract LLM-based generative AI agents are the first autonomous technologies that can act as true conversational partners. Communication researchers and others have already begun to explore the influence of AI conversations on their interlocutors. We present a methodological framework and software tool for conducting field experiments with AI agents on Reddit. The Reddit Conversational Laboratory is Python-based software that identifies potential participants, messages and consents them, and co

Jeremy Foote @jeremy@hci.social

· 13mo ago

I am recruiting PhD students this year!

If you are interested in studying the organizing and self-organizing processes of online communities, the role of AI in online communities, and/or how communities influence their members (and vice versa), then you should come to our research group's info session.

Details are at https://blog.communitydata.science/prospective-phd-student-qa-september-26th/ , including a sign-up link.

You should also reach out to me - contact info is on my website - https://jeremydfoote.com/

Community Data Science Collective

Prospective PhD Student Q&A – September 26th

Thinking about applying to graduate school? Wonder what it’s like to pursue a PhD or research-based master’s degree? Interested in understanding relationships between technology and society? …

Jeremy Foote @jeremy@hci.social

· 29mo ago

Replying to

The TL;DR is that founders differ along a lot of dimensions regarding why they start their subreddits and what they hope they become. Those who are motivated by interest in a topic, and who have plans to recruit others are the most likely to see their communities grow. To learn more, read the blog post, or better yet, read our paper at https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00601 which will be presented at #CHI2024

arXiv.org

How founder motivations, goals, and actions influence early trajectories of online communities

Online communities offer their members various benefits, such as information access, social and emotional support, and entertainment. Despite the important role that founders play in shaping communities, prior research has focused primarily on what drives users to participate and contribute; the motivations and goals of founders remain underexplored. To uncover how and why online communities get started, we present findings from a survey of 951 recent founders of Reddit communities. We find that

Jeremy Foote @jeremy@hci.social

· 29mo ago

Replying to

@jessamyn We can't know for sure without looking at other platforms, but many of the results match up pretty well with my earlier work on wikis (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3025453.3025639) so I think it's a good guess that the main ideas would apply in other similar platforms.

dl.acm.org

Jeremy Foote @jeremy@hci.social

· 29mo ago

Replying to

@siim @skairam Good question. Sanjay ran those analyses so he can correct me if I'm wrong, but every time you look at this kind of activity data, it's heavy tailed, so most subreddits had single digit contributors, some had tens, some may have had hundreds. But in just the first month, most would have been very small.

Jeremy Foote @jeremy@hci.social

· 29mo ago

Replying to

@lutindiscret I think there are some implications for sure. For example, @sohw led a paper about small subreddits and how they benefit from connection to similar big subreddits. @groceryheist has done lots of work around ecosystems of communities. I think there are network effects where you need a critical mass before people move over.

Jeremy Foote @jeremy@hci.social

· 39mo ago

Replying to

@dyutibound I hadn't thought about it this way. There's definitely a tension of wanting prospective students to know about the negative aspects of the job (and the difficulty of landing a job!), but I can see how that acts as a form of gatekeeping.

Jeremy Foote @jeremy@hci.social

· 10mo ago

I gave a talk at Princeton about LLMs in the online social world - the video is now up at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITjITYBEAFE

Slides are at https://jeremydfoote.com/presentations/2025/llmasa_2025/llmasa_2025.html

CITP Seminar: Jeremy Foote - LLMs are Social Actors: Chatbots in the Social World

Jeremy Foote @jeremy@hci.social

· 23mo ago

@andrewiliadis@mastodon.world Are you at AoiR? One of my students is there and you should totally meet her if you are.