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.

翻译：广泛传播的阴谋论可能对社会产生重大影响。本文聚焦于QAnon阴谋论——这一起源于社交媒体并通过其成功扩散的重大阴谋论。我们通过分析参与QAnon相关子版块的用户在平台上的行为特征，特别是其在本社区之外的活动模式。以Reddit于2018年针对QAnon相关活动的大规模版务治理行动为数据源，我们识别出13,000名活跃于早期QAnon社区的用户，收集了这些用户自2016年10月至2021年1月期间在Reddit全站发布的210万条帖文与1080万条评论。研究发现，这些用户绝大多数仅在QAnon阴谋论出现后开始活跃，并在Reddit 2018年QAnon禁令实施后活跃度显著下降。通过对915个"QAnon狂热用户"高频参与的子版块进行质性分析，发现这些用户涉猎范围广泛，常涉及与QAnon无关的领域。然而，其发布的帖文主要集中于对阴谋论持同情态度的子版块，这些版块的特征是讨论内容偏向支持特朗普或强调不受约束的行为（通常表现为反建制与反干涉主义）。对其中1571条帖文的进一步研究表明，绝大多数帖文链接来自低质量信源，可能对Reddit整体社区造成潜在危害。这些结果显示早期QAnon用户在Reddit上的活动具有高度专注性与投入性，为平台内容治理设计与未来研究提供了重要启示。