New article of audience design and pragmatic conceptions of moves and upvotes during advice-giving on Reddit

This new paper by our Dr Rickey Lu, published in a Science Direct journal of Elsevier, investigates how advice-giving is conducted on Reddit, one of the most globally popular online sites where advice interactions routinely occur.

The study involves building a corpus of Reddit advice-giving comments, which was analyzed for the types of moves that appeared. The data was then quantified in order to conduct statistical analyses to explore advice-giving variations by topic, as well as determining the association between moves and upvotes (a digital affordance on Reddit that users can use to interact with comments and posts, akin to the Facebook 'like').

Results show that advice-giving on Reddit is sensitive to the advice topic, and certain moves used during advice-giving are also correlated to variations in upvote scores. Dr Lu argues that these results indicate how different audiences of the advice interaction perceive the interactional goal of advice, highlighting how advice-givers and the audiences of Reddit often have conflicting views on how advice should be given. Ultimately, these findings underscore a need to explore advice from beyond a purely discursive level, by taking into account the mediated features of online platforms where advice often now increasingly take place.

Open access to the article from HERE.