Relationships form the core of connected learning. In this study, we apply and extend social network
analysis methods to uncover the layered network structure of relationships among Fanfiction.net authors
and reviewers. Fanfiction.net, one of the world’s largest fanfiction communities, is a space where millions of
young people engage with written media, connect over shared interests, and receive support and mentoring
from a distributed audience. Does an affinity space such as Fanfiction.net have the same structure as social
networks Facebook and Twitter? We applied k-means clustering on millions of relationships to determine
that Fanfiction.net has 2 to 3 layers, in contrast with the 4-layer structure of Facebook and 5-layer structure
of Twitter. In addition, we conducted a large-scale machine classification of Fanfiction.net reviews to reveal
the types of mentoring exchanged in each layer. Our findings show that the relationships where reviews are
exchanged most frequently are most likely to contain substantive reviews. We discuss implications of these
findings for the theory of distributed mentoring as well as the design of online affinity networks.
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