From the results of our research, it appears that the day/night and weekday/weekend splits are not neutral frames of time, but rather frames through which, typically hidden, power structures can be examined. Recall that in r/confession, “day” typically aligns with institutional schedules that connotatively carry authority and legibility; “night” aligns with domestic, hidden, or intimate spaces that are routinely cast as affective and risk-bearing; “weekday”, sharing many similarities with "day", foregrounds compliance and bureaucracy; “weekend” correlates with humorous/social events that foregrounds both leisure and play. On a closer analysis of this result, we find that these work epistemically: they foreground certain vocabularies as structured and institutional (forms, deadlines, procedures) and background others as merely personal, confessional, or unserious (betrayal, intimacy, partying). In other words, the binaries rank speech: public/administrative discourse reads as responsible; private/affective discourse reads as volatile or less authoritative.
These power structures have immense impact on both members of r/confessions and our analysis of the data (see dropdown menus below)
Posts in the day/weekday partition can make confessions feel more “accountable” (e.g. appointments, documents, signatures), inviting procedural judgment (e.g. “followed rules / broke rules”).
Posts in the night partition situate confessions in intimacy or play, where harm and vulnerability is pathologized (e.g. self-harm). On the other hand, posts in the weekend partition minimizes harm and vulnerability (e.g. mischief). However, posts in either partition seems to evade institutional recognition.
These time partitions may shape how readers value, believe, or dismiss posts—even if the content is equally serious.
Our temporal partitions (day vs. night; weekday vs. weekend) are an epistemic cut: they make certain relations visible (e.g. bureaucracy/compliance; intimacy/ruptures) while silencing others (e.g. non-U.S. time zones, shift work, dawn/dusk transitions)
TF-IDF and embeddings amplify majority usage (documents, exams, appointments) while hiding minority time cultures; this risks naturalizing a U.S.-centric workday as the “default moral clock.”
In selecting target sets for bias axes, we co-produced the very binaries we measured; different seeds or targets sets could generate completely different results. The tools don’t just reveal meaning, they also help make it.
More about the above can be found in our Biases & Assumptions page
Time on r/confession is more than just a timestamp of peoples' confession, it also shapes how their stories are told and heard. A critical, poststructural lens keeps these power structures between the public/bureaucratic, intimate/affective, and casual/lighthearted narratives visible, both in the community’s practice and in our methods, so that “day/night” and “weekday/weekend” remain lenses, not labels; making these partitions useful for noticing patterns instead of declaring truths. This prompt us to ask who gets heard, what counts as credible, and what gets sidelined in different temporal partitions. In practice, that means reading metrics alongside close-reading posts, looking for edge cases, and resisting clean-cut binaries.