  Widespread conspiracy theories may significantly impact our society. This
paper focuses on the QAnon conspiracy theory, a consequential conspiracy theory
that started on and disseminated successfully through social media. Our work
characterizes how Reddit users who have participated in QAnon-focused
subreddits engage in activities on the platform, especially outside their own
communities. Using a large-scale Reddit moderation action against QAnon-related
activities in 2018 as the source, we identified 13,000 users active in the
early QAnon communities. We collected the 2.1 million submissions and 10.8
million comments posted by these users across all of Reddit from October 2016
to January 2021. The majority of these users were only active after the
emergence of the QAnon Conspiracy theory and decreased in activity after
Reddit's 2018 QAnon ban. A qualitative analysis of a sample of 915 subreddits
where the "QAnon-enthusiastic" users were especially active shows that they
participated in a diverse range of subreddits, often of unrelated topics to
QAnon. However, most of the users' submissions were concentrated in subreddits
that have sympathetic attitudes towards the conspiracy theory, characterized by
discussions that were pro-Trump, or emphasized unconstricted behavior (often
anti-establishment and anti-interventionist). Further study of a sample of
1,571 of these submissions indicates that most consist of links from
low-quality sources, bringing potential harm to the broader Reddit community.
These results point to the likelihood that the activities of early QAnon users
on Reddit were dedicated and committed to the conspiracy, providing
implications on both platform moderation design and future research.
