• he/randomly switch any

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leftist/feminist/atheist. into anime, history, mmorpgs, games, cuties, stuff~

genderfluid, usually femboy

About Me Post~ https://cohost.org/Mightfo/post/307133-about-me

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Mightfo
@Mightfo

if you look at subreddit growth for r/nonbinary, r/feminineboys, and r/femboy(not to be confused with r/femboys which is a porn subreddit rather than a sfw one), they all started rapidly expanding in the latter half of 2019 and have been just Explosively Schmoovin ever since.

google trends shows a somewhat similar story where there's some large spike for Nonbinary in mid 2019 which caused a new plateau and then increased growth, and a more explosive spike for femboy after the femboy hooters meme lol. i wonder what that moderate spike for 'nonbinary' was in like june 10th ish 2019...

but yeah i thought it was interesting because i used to assume that any growth of 'nonbinary' was just consistent starting with when trans people started being more noticed in 2012 etc. but it was moderate growth followed by a large growth rate increase in the last 3 years, and femboy follows the same pattern(which i guess is less surprising since femme gnc men had largely not noticed the term until like 2018ish, there was not a generally known "flare" term. maybe i overestimate the extent to which nonbinary was generally known as a term prior to 2019 just because i ran into it more earlier?)

edit: oh, the june 2019 nb spike may've been because Van Ness from Queer Eye came out as NB right then. also maybe i should try to see patterns for other identities and see if theres similar patterns

growth in 2020 doesnt surprise me much because "oh, covid" but 2019 is difficult to pinpoint some major common cause

i'm really curious about the mechanics of this. why did these growth increases coincide, and why 2019? if anyone has any insight i'd love to hear.


hecker
@hecker

I think it's fascinating how terms related to gender and gender identity differ between different cultures and have evolved over time. Here's my own addition to what @Mightfo posted re subreddit growth; the graphs above show the increase in use of the term "nonbinary" in books in English over the past 60 years (1960 to 2019), based on the Google Ngram Viewer. (I tried this with "femboy" as well, but Ngram doesn't return any references at all. Also note that 2019 is the last year for which the Ngram Viewer has data.)

The left graph is "nonbinary" by itself, and the right is "nonbinary" followed by other terms. Note that the bump around 1970 is spurious, due to other uses of "nonbinary"; present-day usage in the context of gender ("nonbinary people", "nonbinary gender", "nonbinary person", etc.) takes off around 2012.


Mightfo
@Mightfo

Thank you, that's really interesting! It being present in books since 2012 coincides with when i thought the term started a consistent rate of growth, hm.

I think the platforms matter a lot here. Generally, written books reflect certain demographics like the literati being aware of something moreso than necessarily a broad spread. And I think theres likely a distinction in terms of "spread" between "knowledge of a term" vs "actually considering identifying with a term, and doing so". That's part of why I emphasized the subreddits- more indicative of identification than, say, only discussion.

Of course, it's also possible there are major distortions with referencing subreddit growth, like specific migrations from tumblr or something.

Its a shame the book data stops at 2019, would be interesting to see if theres any similarities in the subsequent years...

Also, 'pansexual' also had a big subreddit growth increase at the same time, which is interesting. Maybe an lgbt subreddit started pointing people to specific other subreddits around that time or something...?

I wonder if there's any other good statistics we could look at besides subreddits/google trends/ngram... I couldnt find anything for tracking word usage on twitter besides things that cost money(and may not do what we want anyway)...


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in reply to @Mightfo's post:

This is so interesting. I first realized I was nonbinary around 2012 funny enough. I love examining these trends, because they give us defensive ammo against the people who use these trends to discredit us ("look, how can your gender have only existed for 10 years?!") because we've already thought about why these terms spike instead of "well they were INVENTED in 2012"

so as far as 2012 and 2019. I wonder what it would look like if you made graphs of terms like "genderqueer" and "genderfuck" and superimposed them on top? Both ngram and maaaaybe reddit. I have a feeling that perhaps people migrated from a variety of disparate terms (genderqueer, genderfuck, agender, genderfluid, and nonbinary) and kind of coalesced under nonbinary as an umbrella more recently with the various progressions in internet/social media communities. After all, when we gather together, we tend to subconsciously pick specific terms to represent ourselves, whereas before we could gather easily online... it was kind of just "whatever you/your local community came up with"

(To be clear, I know genderqueer/genderfuck/agender/genderfluid all represent different specific identities, but I wouldn't be surprised if different cohorts don't prefer different specific terms for their flavours of nonbinary. For instance, I became an adult knowing genderqueer as My Term before nonbinary came into vogue, even though both fit)

I'd also be curious if this is just a kind of... maturing time? Like we see nonbinary appear in (potentially more niche) literature and online spaces in 2012, which gave it 7 years to reach critical mass, have big celebs come out as nonbinary, etc, which would lead to a boom in more mainstream things like reddit.

Could also be something like the kids who were ~13 in 2012-14 and just hearing about nonbinary identities finally hit 18 and started identifying as nonbinary/going to nonbinary subreddits. The timelines don't reeaaaally add up there, but I'd be curious to see how much of this is gen z hitting age of majority.

anyways that was a whole lot of spitballing. Fun stuff.

I don't think this is a growth chart specific to non-binary identities. It also coincides with growth for most queer subreddits I can see, as well as r/catswithjobs, r/nihilism, r/teenagers, r/me_irl, r/athiesm, r/therightcantmeme, r/conservatives, r/christian, r/youtube, r/republican. They all explode in popularity around 2019 with very similar curves (that's just a small sampling, it's SO MANY).

Based on what I'm seeing, the popularity spike of 2019 is common among subreddits that I think would be more popular among 1) young people and 2) leftists and liberals. It's hard to suss out the common threads though, like I wasn't expecting r/conservatives and r/christian. Subreddits like r/science, r/worldnews, r/art don't have that growth spike at all; theirs is around 2016.

In 2019, reddit started to actually ban subreddits focusing on hate. People might remember from the news the incel subreddits that were removed, but there were thousands. I think 2019 was around the time reddit stopped being seen as a lawless place of hatred for right-wing bigots. It's reputation settled down, people know now reddit as a mixed bag without being overwhelmed by reactionary far/alt-right scum. I think the common popularity spike around 2019 just coincides with that.

I found the common thread for subreddits that don't follow that trend. It's the default subreddits. Prior to 2017 all new users would be automatically subscribed to a number of "default" subreddits. They're all massively popular for obvious reasons, and you can't see the 2019 surge in any of their charts. Either new users just aren't going there, or their numbers just aren't significant enough to show up on the charts. Like, showerthoughts, a former default subreddit, has 26 million subscribers, and nonbinary has 190 thousand.

EDIT: not all subreddits that don't follow the trend were default subreddits. Obviously many subreddits are going to have their own popularity histories related to a whole slew of variables. for instance, gay_irl's popularity has slowed since around 2019

Wow, you're right! This seems to be a general pattern among a lot of subreddits. Thanks for pointing this out and relating it to reddit banning hate subreddits. I definitely recall reddit having a reputation for being a lot more hateful and right-wing but it clashes so much with my experience since 2019, I wondered if I was just misremembering or if it was just a shift on some parts of the internet in general or something.

I feel kind of bad now since the subreddit growth gives a distorted picture even if it has some relations to google trends... ah well. I wonder what other communities have statistics that would be worth looking at and would give indicators of the last few years that are less affected by recent platform changes...

I really did not think that anything reddit did could cause such a huge shift(especially since the 4~ other reddits i glanced at didnt have the same pattern). This really says a lot about the power of banning hate on a platform, thats way more impact that I would've anticipated

No worries at all, it's a really common and really easy trap to fall into when looking at data. I remember a youtube video where somebody explained it by looking at the number of horror moving skyrocketing since the early 2000s. It was like "wow horror really took off, I wonder what event in the early 2000s made horror more popular" but in reality ALL movie genres saw similar charts because there were more movies being made in general.

It was really interesting comparing the growth charts of different subreddits and trying to feel what the common threads were. I really wish I could find a similar chart over many years of the popular of reddit overall, but I was surprised I couldn't find that data. I'm sure it's out there. The one promising statistics site I went to told me to pay/sign up to see more, no thanks XD

Hmm, so reddit banned a lot of hate subreddits like thedonald in early 2020, and the incel+altright ban was 2017... so i'm not sure it was that, but i cant find any other reddit stuff that seems like it was timed right for this... the change from default subreddits was 2017. So i'm not sure what caused this reddit-wide phenomenon to happen at so specific a time

Also, regardless i'm really happy that r/nonbinary and femboy and feminineboys got a huge growth period, even if its not 1:1 indicative of a trend, having a large decent public space like that is a big boon for community and growth and such