Challenge 4: Lurking

In terms of social media, the term lurking means to read and look through social media but do not post your own ideas or comments. Lurking is usually looked down upon in most social media communities. But for our assignment this week we were given the task to lurk on various social media sites to discover how the different communities communicate and open up ideas on our topics. For this week again I did my lurking on Twitter. But for my other social media site I decided to explore Reddit a website that I already lurk on.

For my lurk through twitter I started with the hashtag #mentalhealth and began exploring the top posters for this hashtag. I would occasionally open up twitter throughout the day on my phone and plug in the hashtag to see which posters would pop up. One of the recurring posters was this twitter account called @MHChat which is an open access community for mental health. On their twitter account they give a link to their actual website mhchat.com which is an open forum that allows people to post their views and experiences. The website also contains links to articles that describe whats going on in the world of mental health research. Other then MHChat the hashtag usually yielded results from everyday users who are either posting their problems or stories of others and links to sites that could help you or that could provide some support. Lurking on twitter was super easy for me because I’m always on twitter throughout the day and I never tweet anything so all I did was focus my attention to the hashtag and learn how the people that posted on their acted with each other.

For my other social media site I decided to use one site that I personally frequent a lot, Reddit. Reddit is a huge online community that self-coined themselves the “front page of the internet” because a lot of things like jokes or news articles usually get shared on reddit first. On Reddit itself you can scroll through the side and find various “subreddits” which are very similar to hashtags on twitter in the sense that these “subreddits” are topics and threads focused on the same thing, so for my lurk I used the subreddit r/mentalhealth. On this subreddit it was very similar to twitter where people posted their own personal experiences and how their experiences can help others. Sometimes users would post question on the site hoping that someone out there would have the knowledge to help them with whatever they are going through. I attached a picture of what the subreddit looked like on my phone just in case anyone was interested in seeing it.

 

For me lurking was not all that bad because I usually lurked regardless on both of these sites. The only thing I had to do different was just frequent either the hashtag or subreddit that pertained to my topic. Things I learned during lurking was that twitter definitely had more people posting but I feel that reddit had more people commenting and actively trying to help their fellow redditors. The connections made on Reddit felt stronger since the community on Reddit has this weird feeling of closeness amongst themselves.

Overall lurking through these sites showed me many more sad stories and experiences and has proven even more that the mental healthcare in our country needs to be greatly improved.