Nobody Wants to Work Anymore: An Analysis of r/antiwork and the Interplay between Social and Mainstream Media during the Great Resignation

r/antiwork is a Reddit community that focuses on the discussion of worker exploitation, labour rights and related left-wing political ideas (e.g. universal basic income). In late 2021, r/antiwork became the fastest growing community on Reddit, coinciding with what the mainstream media began referring to as the Great Resignation. This same media coverage was attributed with popularising the subreddit and, therefore, accelerating its growth. In this article, we explore how the r/antiwork community was affected by the exponential increase in subscribers and the media coverage that chronicled its rise. We investigate how subreddit activity changed over time, the behaviour of heavy and light users, and how the topical nature of the discourse evolved with the influx of new subscribers. We report that, despite the continuing rise of subscribers well into 2022, activity on the subreddit collapsed after January 25th 2022, when a moderator's Fox news interview was widely criticised. While many users never commented again, longer running trends of users' posting and commenting behaviour did not change. Finally, while many users expressed their discontent at the changing nature of the subreddit as it became more popular, we found no evidence of major shifts in the topical content of discussion over the period studied, with the exception of the introduction of topics related to seasonal events (e.g. holidays, such as Thanksgiving) and ongoing developments in the news (e.g. working from home and the curtailing of reproductive rights in the United States).