Making Memes Count: Platformed Rallying on Reddit

This chapter sets out to untangle the intimate relationships between the quantified storytelling practices of an online community and the digital platform it exists on. Taking the highly controversial subreddit The_Donald as its object of study, the chapter moves towards a close reading of a post and its comments from the subreddit through, first, an analysis of the metricized affordances of the reddit platform and, second, a discussion on how to characterize this particular online gathering in relation to concepts such as online community, counterpublic and affective crowd. The reading demonstrates how the subreddit utilizes what the chapter terms incongruous rescriptings and reflexive quantified storytelling to mobilize an online following and how this following moulds its discursive strategies to make the most of the affordances set up by the platform.