That's a lot of 18 year olds. Could be that women a bit older than 18 say they are 18 to get more likes because of the "barely legal" factor. Or much worse, all 16 and 17 year olds report their age as 18 to be able to post naked photos there.
Everybody seems to be complaining that the users of r/gonewild self report their ages and that it's unlikely that they are actually 18, as though that invalidates the data. It doesn't; the self reporting is the entire point!
We can extrapolate from this data. r/gonewild is a sub of exhibitionism. Posts are upvoted based on popularity from the community of consumers, not producers. The reported age is a part of the content of the content itself. Therefore, we can conclude that there is a reinforcement mechanism for reporting age: more will report the most popular age because that has a higher chance of being upvoted.
So, this data may not say a whole lot about the identity of r/gonewild's posters, but it says a whole lot about the sub's consumers.
![image showing On /r/gonewild, 18 year-olds rule [OC]](abd48109-c1cf-5ef9-9610-bd050d7e24e9.jpg)
JurijFedorov on October 1st, 2017 at 17:39 UTC »
That's a lot of 18 year olds. Could be that women a bit older than 18 say they are 18 to get more likes because of the "barely legal" factor. Or much worse, all 16 and 17 year olds report their age as 18 to be able to post naked photos there.
blndcavefsh on October 1st, 2017 at 17:43 UTC »
Obviously they should be pretending to be 37
JackKieser on October 1st, 2017 at 18:07 UTC »
Everybody seems to be complaining that the users of r/gonewild self report their ages and that it's unlikely that they are actually 18, as though that invalidates the data. It doesn't; the self reporting is the entire point!
We can extrapolate from this data. r/gonewild is a sub of exhibitionism. Posts are upvoted based on popularity from the community of consumers, not producers. The reported age is a part of the content of the content itself. Therefore, we can conclude that there is a reinforcement mechanism for reporting age: more will report the most popular age because that has a higher chance of being upvoted.
So, this data may not say a whole lot about the identity of r/gonewild's posters, but it says a whole lot about the sub's consumers.