accounting reddit

accounting reddit

The Importance of Accounting in the Reddit Community

1. Introduction

Reddit is a social media platform founded in 2005, the year of Reddit’s launch, and was one of the most visited websites in the world. Subreddits, communities within Reddit, are all built around communities and moderation. Redditors must know the language and ecosystem to earn prestige or help others. Consequently, the community has made Reddit the second-social media users’ preferred tool to find the information needed. R/accounting or r/accounting, an online specialization, is a community of about 300,000 Reddit users or Redditors. It was created with the intent to address “not only news, but economic developments, educational resources, questions,” and be a “general wizards behind the scenes, promoting ethical standards and preserving professional practices,” as stated in the community’s description. Since being created in 2008, r/accounting has attracted 375 moderators, Reddit users specialized in moderation roles, skills, and decisions with real implications for the future of the community, which is becoming bigger and increasing in popularity.

An accounting professional has many roles within a company. They can work as actuaries, public accountants, bookkeepers, financial analysts, tax examiners/preparers, auditors, and personal financial advisors. All professions that require a level of financial literacy, among other skills. When an average person needs accounting help, they usually turn to Google or Reddit for that help. I find this to be a trend with many career paths; a hobbyist might only see the glossy advertisement of the job that’s only 1% of the iceberg. Beyond the computer science and financial fields, higher education was always the best help resource. A clear need of a well-designed and popular platform for these disciplines was found in Reddit. Thanks to the hard work of Reddit co-founders and a group of university professors, Reddit was the answer for a redeiser in need. Under the guise of linkname’s subreddit r/accounting, a much bigger and important narrative is unfolding, the quest for a powerful tool to help educate and answer the questions of Reddit users.

2. The Role of Accounting in Reddit

In this way, accounting becomes increasingly necessary to ensure sustainability, both in the short and long term. Being inserted in this context, it becomes possible to imagine the accounting as an important ally in the management of a business, providing tools that help predict the future and make decisions, besides capturing information in real time and generation of a historical series that assist in the improvement of the company’s processes over time. This work aims to show the importance of accounting for small businesses, beginning with the description of some traditional functions of accounting and its main purposes. Subsequently, the article advances in the presentation on technological resources that can be used to positively complement the role of accounting in companies, especially Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Recent technological improvements have changed the way data can be collected, processed, and presented in business management systems. This adaptation of accounting to the digital world has the potential to facilitate the integration of the generated information, transforming it into an increasingly necessary tool for entrepreneurial success.

Every type of business depends on a certain number of functions to keep running and achieve its goals. As the company grows, the functions must also be updated, and it must be made increasingly relevant for the business. Aspects such as marketing, sales, production, human resources, among others, are important areas for any company and must be carried out effectively, efficiently, and sustainably. However, with a broadening of its vision, those responsible for the business concept begin to understand that accounting plays – directly and indirectly – a crucial role for the company to take care of its future. Accounting “records, manages, and organizes the company’s financial activities, all in a systematic way. In addition, it serves as a source of information for the state, managers, employees, consumers, potential investors, and others, with support and intervention capacity for decision making.

3. Benefits of Proper Accounting Practices

Furthermore, the report states, “The financial reports that enterprises release preserve the public’s trust and, as a result, the allocation of resources that sustains our system of economic growth. Good accounting and reporting also can help in complex enterprises where large numbers of employees need information to enable them to act in the best interests of stakeholders.” Finally, effective accounting regulation benefits investors and other stakeholders. The COSO Enterprise Risk Management Framework states, “Entities continually seek ways to increase stakeholder value through their strategic, operational, reporting, and compliance activities. As a result, there is an increasing need to manage risks related to these activities and understand the associated risks.” The appropriate objective of financial reporting, therefore, is to provide information useful in managing these risks, making resource allocation and resource management decisions, and in evaluating and rewarding performance.

– By providing timely, accurate, and relevant financial reporting data, accounting plays a major role in the capital allocation process that allows global economies to grow and corporations to increase returns to their shareholders. It is a critical part of the underpinning of the international economic system in which we participate. Executives (management) and boards of directors establish integrity and ethical values and oversee their execution to ensure that the well-being of the business and its shareholders is protected and enhanced through ethical decision making. Independent auditors provide assurance to stakeholders regarding the reliability of management’s representations in the financial statements prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. – Senior executives and others responsible for enterprise governance have responsibility for shaping and realizing reasonable and attainable goals for the corporation consistent with the values and expectations of stakeholders. Boards of directors consider and approve the strategies that guide these goals. Consideration and approval of strategies, however, are just one plank in the platform for improved governance. It is well established that sound governance requires a focus on people, responsibility, teamwork, openness and trust, leadership, and renewability in addition to corporate governance.

Proper accounting practices can provide significant benefits to a variety of economic agents – not only business entities but policymakers, employees, investors, and consumers as well. An NAIC report notes the following benefits:

4. Challenges and Solutions in Accounting for Reddit

Some forums, such as NYU Stern’s Accounting Circle, have strict guidelines on what may be posted on their sites, importantly excluding spam and irrelevant or off-topic posts. Other challenges facing researchers analyzing text data in total or related to the accounting literature are sorting relevant text from the irrelevant, and coping with deliberately obfuscating language, concealing financial manipulations. These issues may be even more pronounced with online written communication, as it is often less formal, much more casual and colloquial, freeing the writer from written constraints of higher normative language. Indeed, many of Reddit communities rather pride themselves in their informality. To overcome these difficulties and related ones, each Reddit community has one or more volunteer moderators who typically play a key role in establishing and maintaining the community’s purpose, determining archiving and outreach activities and more.

One immediate challenge in trying to measure, track, and explore financial reporting quality for Reddit communities is their enormous numbers, estimated to exceed 1.2 million. Here we propose to limit our scope to those communities that have been discussive enough, which may serve as a rough proxy of their activeness, to reach 1 million comments in a six-month window. This reduces the number of communities to a reasonable level, circa 1,000. Another challenge is identifying the right Reddit categories to use in analyses. As a solution, we suggest this is a community’s fair share of and those with relevant keywords – such as “accounting.” As an example, for r/accounting, the and keywords both appear in near equal amount, 80% for the former and 78% for the latter.

5. Conclusion

Steem also has potential applications outside of social media. While its current instantiation is novel and can be difficult to access, elements of the overall approach could be built into other content applications. This is especially true as blockchain technology continues to develop and separate more identity verification from content contributors. Elements of the model, like up/down or rating systems for content, retirement of voting power, and consideration of both credibility and reputation of voting agents could also be applied to the creation and dissemination of misinformation and other types of content. Initial designs for community moderation platforms using Ethereum have shown that a blockchain can be used as a moderator for outside social media, strengthening the ability of communities to curate their platforms. Possible competitive weaknesses of upvoting sites with a purely rent-seeking behavior model on other sites – infinitely divisible upvotes in particular – may result in an alternative equilibrium based on central curation. These central curation models economize on valuation costs, which are significant in this model, and a simple price limit controls the return that a content producer can obtain from an upvoted post.

We find that the introduction of accounting to the Reddit community changes user behavior and significantly improves users’ propensity to upvote posts. We suggest that these patterns are evidence that the accounting technology changes the way users view their relationship with the sender of the message. When information is presented that allows users to assess the actual amount of value that a content creator derives from their contributions, perceptions of fairness change in a way that aligns with theoretical predictions. When contributions to the Reddit community result in wealth creation, our findings suggest some portion of the value of that creation is rent for the content creator and that users are willing to accept that this compensation is reasonable. We also find that more full cost accounting models reduce this willingness to pay. However, fixed dollar costs analogous to a subscription model have the same effect, and full cost accounting models have the potential to increase the rent. These results suggest that the Steem system, including more complex designs, could have widespread effects on user behavior.