Published on: April 24, 2026 at 12:03 pm
By Nick Keppler
Almost every career or profession has a subreddit or Facebook group dedicated to it. In some cases, online forums where professionals solicit and give advice, peer to peer, make for an invaluable way to learn vicariously from others, said Academy of Management Scholar Christoper Myers of Johns Hopkins University.
Myers studied a closed-member Facebook group for robotic surgeons. New devices, such as Intuitive Surgical’s Da Vinci Robotic Surgical System, have created a new mode of surgery, where surgeons control robotic arms from a console and view the process through high-resolution cameras.
“At the time we were doing our study, it was still new enough that you might be the only person doing robotic procedures within a 50-mile radius of where you are,” Myers said, meaning that practitioners did not have a pool of colleagues physically nearby with whom to consult.
“Facebook provided a substitute for that,” he said. “People were able to plug into a worldwide network and get advice.”
Many interviewed for his research saw the group “as a big part of their professional development and learning.”
This group had some unique facets that probably made it more efficient than an average subreddit. Administrators only admitted vetted robotic surgeons. The comments section was not littered with chime-ins from random lurkers.
Also, robotic surgery creates a record of videos detailing every part of the process.
Surgeons could simply post them. They did not need to describe an issue in detail, a time-consuming process, and other members got an accurate, unadulterated view of the concern about which they were being queried. (Because they did not show any identifying details, these videos were seen as generally compliant with laws governing patient privacy.)
“Within a matter of hours, you can have ten opinions, feedback from vetted folks,” Myers said.
Other career forums may be less valuable than this example, said Myers, but this type of online group of people working in a particular profession have become a permanent part of the way people build their professional knowledge.
“I think there’s variability in how high quality the exchange can be, but I think they’re increasingly a part of our lives, and as we turn to more remote work setups, these will likely take the place of kind of the water-cooler conversations that used to help us get feedback or new ideas from colleagues working on similar problems,” he said.
