van der Maas Mark, Samuel Jim
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, USA.
Harm Reduct J. 2025 May 13;22(1):77. doi: 10.1186/s12954-025-01220-0.
Globally, there has been a rapid increase in the availability of online gambling. As online gambling has increased in popularity, there has been a corresponding increase in online communities that discuss gambling. The movement of gambling and communities interested in gambling to online spaces presents new challenges to harm reduction. The current study analyses a forum from a popular online forum hosting website (reddit.com) to determine its suitability as a source for data to inform gambling harm reduction in online spaces.
The current study provides an exploratory analysis of 1,141 unique posts and 11,668 comments collected from the online forum r/onlinegambling. The dataset covers posts and comments from August 5, 2015, to October 30, 2023. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques were used to identify common terms and phrases, identify topics with high rates of participant engagement and perform a sentiment analysis of posts and comments.
Sentiment analysis results showed that the majority of posts and comments were positive, but there were substantial numbers of negative and neutral content. Positive content was often congratulatory and focused on winning, neutral posts more commonly focused on practical advice, and negative posts were more commonly concerned with avoiding operators perceived as illegitimate by forum participants.
Results from this study show that there is a varied and robust discussion of different aspects of gambling on r/onlinegambling. Our exploratory analyses suggest that this reddit forum provides important information on how users communicate motivations to gamble, interpretations of gambling experiences, and define potential harms related to gambling online as well as how to avoid or remedy those harms. Reddit forums discussing gambling have great potential for future research interested in more specific aspects of harm reduction and prevention related to online gambling, particularly when using NLP techniques.
在全球范围内，在线赌博的可及性迅速增加。随着在线赌博越来越受欢迎，讨论赌博的在线社区也相应增加。赌博活动以及对赌博感兴趣的社区向网络空间的转移给减少危害带来了新挑战。本研究分析了一个热门在线论坛托管网站（reddit.com）上的一个论坛，以确定其作为数据来源的适用性，为减少网络空间中的赌博危害提供信息。
本研究对从在线论坛r/onlinegambling收集的1141个独特帖子和11668条评论进行了探索性分析。数据集涵盖了2015年8月5日至2023年10月30日的帖子和评论。使用自然语言处理（NLP）技术来识别常见的术语和短语，识别参与者参与率高的主题，并对帖子和评论进行情感分析。
情感分析结果表明，大多数帖子和评论是积极的，但也有大量的负面和中性内容。积极内容通常是祝贺性的，侧重于获胜；中性帖子更常见地侧重于实用建议；负面帖子更常见地关注避免被论坛参与者视为非法的运营商。
本研究结果表明，在r/onlinegambling上对赌博的不同方面进行了多样且深入的讨论。我们的探索性分析表明，这个Reddit论坛提供了关于用户如何表达赌博动机、对赌博经历的解读、定义与在线赌博相关的潜在危害以及如何避免或补救这些危害的重要信息。讨论赌博的Reddit论坛对于未来对与在线赌博相关的更具体的减少危害和预防方面感兴趣的研究具有巨大潜力，特别是在使用NLP技术时。
