Abstract
Objectives
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.
Methods
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.
Results
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.
Conclusions
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.
Citation
van der Maas, M., Samuel, J. Online gambling forums as a potential target for harm reduction: an exploratory natural language processing analysis of a reddit.com forum. Harm Reduct J 22, 77 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12954-025-01220-0