Audience design and pragmatic conceptions of moves and upvotes during advice-giving on Reddit

Abstract

Turning to the internet to seek and give advice has become increasingly widespread. One of the most popular online sites where advice interactions routinely occur is Reddit. As a public-oriented site, it is important to understand advice interactions on Reddit not only from a descriptive perspective, but also how other audiences might perceive or interact with the advice, which may be evidenced by the platform's mediated features (e.g. Reddit's upvote system). Thus, this project investigates Reddit advice-giving and its relationship with Reddit's upvote system, and how the suitability of the advice might be perceived, and evidenced, on the platform. I adopt move analysis (c.f. Swales, 1981, 1990) to explore the types of moves used in Reddit advice-giving. I also extend the theoretical conception of the move onto Spencer-Oatey and Kádár's (2021) pragmatic notion of the interactional goal, in addition to exploring the association between moves and upvotes using Poisson regression modeling. My results provide a granular and empirical understanding of both the association between upvotes and moves, along with how different advice-giving moves affect our perceptions of advice. I also advance our understanding of Reddit as a site for computer-mediated communication and our understanding of advice as an interactional process.