Reddit Confessions Through a Temporal Lens
by Jiaquan Li
by Jiaquan Li
Welcome to a research project about the subreddit r/confession. This website will detail our research on an oft-neglected aspect of reddit posts in scholarly analysis -- time. Specifically, we will dive into the hidden effects that time has on the contents of the confessions that people make on reddit. We will showcase a multifaceted analysis of fifty thousand posts using both large data analysis techniques (i.e. Temporal analysis, TF-IDF, Word Embeddings) powered by python complemented with close hermeneutic reading of selected posts to both confirm and challenge the conclusions we drew from the results of quantitative analysis.
Confession is a social form with long standing footing in human society, appearing frequently in religious, judicial, and therapeutic contexts. This part of human society has also gained a new form in the digital age; online, it is shaped by anonymity, community norms, and, as our analysis will show, time. If daytime/weekday posts foreground institutions and obligation, night posts foreground trauma and intimacy, and weekend posts foreground leisure/casualness, then r/confessions is a ground occupied by different communities with different norms depending on the time of day and/or even the day of the week. Thus our analysis offers us a clean view into how time can affect a digital manifestation of a long standing human tradition