Original title: Local-Oriented Online Communities in Urban Communication Infrastructures: News Media, Engagement, and Emotion in 128 North American City Communities
Yibin Fan · September 2026
People often talk about local and national news in online neighborhood forums, but researchers do not fully understand what drives their reactions. To study this, researchers looked at how these local online spaces connect to larger news networks. They examined how news and local topics shape how much people participate and what emotions they share. They discovered that linking to either mainstream or local news sources greatly boosted community participation, but it also made the tone of the conversations more negative. Similarly, posts about city government drove more participation while stirring up negative feelings. In contrast, posts about everyday city life showed the exact opposite pattern, creating an engagement–negativity tradeoff between high participation and bad moods.
Imagine a neighborhood group chat. When someone posts about a pothole, people jump in with complaints and the chat gets lively but grumpy; when someone shares a nice sunset photo, people like it but few comment. In this paper, the group chat is a city's online community, the pothole posts are news and government topics, and the sunset posts are everyday urban life topics. The grumpy, lively posts get the most response, while the pleasant ones get less.
For anyone who runs or studies online city communities, this shows that the content that drives participation is also the content that drives negative emotion. Local newsrooms and moderators face a real tradeoff: chasing engagement tends to bring anger, while warmer everyday-life posts get less response.
The abstract doesn't say whether the findings are causal, whether they generalize beyond North American city subreddits or beyond 2024, or how emotional expression was measured. It also doesn't address other types of online communities or platforms.
Ask anything about this paper. Answers come from its abstract, and say so when the abstract doesn't cover your question.
Local-Oriented Online Communities in Urban Communication Infrastructures: News Media, Engagement, and Emotion in 128 North American City Communities — Yibin Fan — SocArXiv — doi:10.31235/osf.io/nvbqu_v2
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.