Assistant professor of Communication at Purdue University. I mostly study online communities using computational methods, including trace data, agent-based modeling, and network analysis.
Member of the Community Data Science Collective (https://communitydata.science/)
#commodon
#computationalSocialScience
#ABM
#onlineCommunities
| Website | https://jeremydfoote.com |
| GitHub | https://github.com/jdfoote |
| Collective | https://communitydata.science |
The paper describing the tool and making an argument for its benefits (and delineating some of the risks and drawbacks to this approach) is out in Computational Communication Research:
https://www.aup-online.com/content/journals/10.5117/CCR2026.2.5.FOOT
The open source GitHub project is at:
https://github.com/jdfoote/Reddit-Conversation-Laboratory
We (me, Loizos Bitsikokos, Hitesh Goel, and Deepak Kumar) hope that this paper and library make it much easier for others to pursue this kind of research. Contributions and pull requests to the project are very welcome!
LLM-based generative AI agents are the first autonomous technologies that can act as true conversational partners. Communication researchers and others have already begun to explore the influence of AI conversations on their interlocutors. We present a methodological framework and software tool for conducting field experiments with AI agents on Reddit. The Reddit Conversational Laboratory is Python-based software that identifies potential participants, messages and consents them, and conducts conversational experiments with researcher-designed AI chatbots. In addition to storing all conversations, the software can also record participant behavior before and after conversations. In this paper, we outline design principles, best practices for using the tool, and possibilities for future extensions.
This is a set of software tools designed to do conversational AI field experiments. It recruits and consents Reddit users, assigns them to conditions, manages and store their conversations with chatbots, and tracks their public behavior before and after the intervention.
This allows researchers to track longer-term changes to behavior in a real-life setting.
New paper!
Conversations with AI chatbots have been shown to be persuasive across a bunch of contexts. However, most of these studies are short-term and track only changes in attitudes or beliefs.
We wanted to look at the long-term impact of chatbot conversations on behaviors, so we built the Reddit Conversation Library.
RE: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116079436848872126
Cory blogged about my paper! It's a great write-up. Thanks Cory!
A few weeks back I gave a talk at Stanford about some of our work on generative AI in the online social world.
The video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IH-hRdNMIq0
Preprints of the work are at:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10754
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20100
Though I have to admit that claiming that having people betting somehow creates value by creating predictions of future events is very creative.
But if predictions were your product you'd be selling the predictions. The whole operation would be inverted. You'd select random people to place bets, give them play money and keep the results secret to sell.
But no one cares. It's just gambling and people will get hurt because of it.
I gave a talk at Princeton about LLMs in the online social world - the video is now up at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITjITYBEAFE
Slides are at https://jeremydfoote.com/presentations/2025/llmasa_2025/llmasa_2025.html
Science of Community Dialogue: The Impacts of Organizational Interventions in Open Source Software Engineering
This dialogue will take place on November 7th at 12pm CT and will explore how free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) projects adapt their work processes to recruit new contributors and build the project communities that they want, and how FLOSS projects redesign collaboration processes within different environments and moments in project lifecycles.…
This dialogue will take place on November 7th at 12pm CT and will explore how free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) projects adapt their work processes to recruit new contributors and build t…
Stephen Turner
Benjamin Mako Hill
Nathan TeBlunthuis
myrmepropagandist
Community Data Science