Challenge 4: Lurking PT 2
Hello everybody! For this weeks challenge we continued to lurk on social media that was related to our topic. For this week I continued to lurk on twitter and reddit and remained on the same hashtag and subreddit, checking periodically so see what the sites were up to. This weeks challenge was an extension of last week where we are lurking on various social media sites looking for information on our controversial topics. For the past few weeks I have been able to find valuable insight on my topic of mental health on both twitter and reddit.
As I continued to lurk on twitter and reddit I have realized that both kind of have similar helpful communities on them. On both twitter and reddit various users seem to enjoy posting stories of situations of where mental health has affected their lives and how they overcame these situations. Other similarities include users that post their personal stories seeking help from other users. Something that I found wonderful was that on reddit more times than not when a user was posting some sort of cry for help, users would comment on their post words of encouragement or ways that they can overcome their issues. Users would even go as far as finding links mental health pages to further help the user in need.
After lurking for two weeks things that have changed since the beginning till now is how I choose what posts to look into. After being on twitter looking at mental health I’ve noticed that their a lot of posts that keep leading you to different sites so I’ve avoided clicking links that lead to lists or other unknown sites. On reddit I’ve learned how to avoid to “troll” posts that unfortunately occur on sites were users try to remain anonymous. However, through all the lurking I have found mostly both sites are very helpful in helping people find ways to cope with mental help. The two following screenshotsare examples of how twitter and reddit attempt to help fellow uses.
The picture on the left is a reddit user trying to relate another users story to their own so they can try and help on the right is a screenshot of a twitter user posting an article about a therapy that could possibly help with schizophrenia.
