Social sharing of emotions in social media system: results of the analysis of creepypasta`s comments on Reddit

Abstract

The relevance of the article is explained by the communicative significance and the functions that the social media system has today. American platform Reddit is not only a platform for world-class communication but also it’s a space for possible implementation of offline interaction models. Currently, both the popularity of Reddit and its influence on the physical world are growing. The object of the study is users’ comments to the highly talked creepypasta “My Sleep Paralysis Demon is Actually A Pretty Chill Guy”. This creepypasta is published in NoSleep community that is the most popular subreddit for sharing horror posts. We use a creepypasta as a convenient material for research due to its communicative nature. This is digital fictional content that is perceived as real (through the internal rules of the NoSleep community) and is not temporal. The article studies the process of social exchange of emotions, their re-experience during the description of the event that caused them. The aim of the study is to find out whether Reddit allows the laws of real social interaction to be transferred to the online space. To solve the problem was used a set of methods, chief among them was the intent analysis. Results. The study has shown that user feedback can be represented by one of three forms (or their certain combination): direct emotional feedback that expresses a certain emotion obtained after reading the creepypasta, commenting on a story that is predominantly a rational expression of thoughts about a story, and a personal experience that is a presentation of information about users commenting on creepypasta. Their calculation showed the existence of common features between offline social sharing of emotions and its digital counterpart. The ratio of different forms of comments depends on the degree of discussion of creepy paste and the specifics of the central topic. Creepypasta is currently actively attracting the attention of scientists around the world, but its formation and formation as a genre of the digital environment is mainly studied. This study focused on the specifics of Creepypasta on Reddit, taking into account the internal rules of the community. For further research, it seems promising to study other genres of the digital environment from the perspective of social sharing of emotions.