Online Community Engagement when Talking About Infidelity: The Case of Reddit

Writing or talking about upsetting events on social media has many benefits for posters, es-pecially in forums such as Reddit that support pseudonymity. The act of writing in itself has therapeutic effects on mental health; posters can find others who share similar experiences, thus addressing feelings of loneliness and isolation; and posters can receive social support. Community engagement is a prerequisite for obtaining support on social media. In this study, we investigate community engagement for social media about a specific stressful life event, the experience of infidelity. What constitutes infidelity varies from person to person. Here, we focus on people reporting that a romantic partner has done something which the person perceives as an act of infidelity. We chose Reddit, as this platform encourages pseudony-mous discussion. Using unsupervised clustering, we create a typology of posts and commentsthat elicit different levels of community engagement and discuss implications for the management of online communities.