I scraped five years of posts and comments from Reddit's Adelaide subreddit.
Digging through 1.5 million of them for insights about what locals actually care about, this project asks the question:
Do approaches like this deserve a place in the community development worker's toolkit?
Chapter 01
Why Reddit?
IMO engaging with communities and having a yarn with locals is one of the most rewarding parts of community work.
But formal consultation can often be slow, expensive, limited in scope and — most critically — not something you can do in your pyjamas at home with a cup of tea.
Online public forums like Reddit represent the unmanaged, unsolicited community conversation: people talking to each other without an audience of practitioners in mind. r/Adelaide has over 160,000 members and five years of searchable conversation. This project gobbles it all up, runs it through a computer a few times to see if anything useful emerges.
One key limitation to acknowledge upfront is that social media platforms often skew towards a specific demographic. Users are roughly 60% male, heavily concentrated in the 18–29 age bracket, and disproportionately students, tech workers, and people who have strong opinions about mechanical keyboards. There is also a very high chance that not all of these posts were written by humans — like all online domains, these platforms are subject to the inevitable creep of AI slop.
Chapter 02
How It Works
A five-stage pipeline turns raw Reddit data into structured community intelligence.
Chapter 03
What Adelaide
Talks About
Top 5 most discussed themes each year. Bar width = relative volume. Blue is positive, yellow is negative.
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
What stands out
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Chapter 04
Is Adelaide a
Lonely City?
Beyond positive/negative, NRC emotion profiling reveals how a community feels about specific issues. The same volume of conversation can carry very different emotional weight.
5,422 loneliness-tagged posts and comments were extracted from r/Adelaide between 2021 and 2025. The Sankey below maps what those conversations were actually about.
Loneliness conversation on r/Adelaide spiked sharply during the Omicron wave (December 2021 – January 2022) then fell back — but has never returned to pre-pandemic baseline. Volume has slowly climbed again since 2023.
So what
Engagement doesn't have to start with a blank page. A community development worker who arrives at a consultation already knowing that housing, crime, and loneliness are the live concerns — and that gardening groups and charities are where the most positive energy sits — is better positioned to listen, and better positioned to act.