This dissertation examines how participants in one anonymous online forum, r/FundieSnarkUncensored, reversed a trend of bullying and targeted hate by reinventing their community as one based in storytelling. In this study, I draw on a feminist and cultural rhetorics methodology to advance a more comprehensive understanding of storytelling’s role in promoting prosocial online behavior. To do so, I use digital feminist research methods, including participant-observation, semi-structured interviews, and computational topic modeling. On a broad scale, my findings indicate potential strategies for more humane communication, even on contentious topics and within online spaces with neutral-to-hostile architectures. Specifically, r/FundieSnarkUncensored’s turn to story-based snark precipitated changes in community moderation practices, including a form of quasi-mentorship for new volunteer moderators and an iterative process for developing community rules that both discourage harmful behaviors and incentivize positive behaviors through conversations with non-moderator community members. These changes in moderation style shifted the window of acceptable discursive practices within the subreddit and were amplified by Reddit’s sorting algorithms, pushing the forum to continue to create nuanced, relational content. As such, members who joined the forum with a range of orientations towards snark and towards the fundamentalists upon whom the community snarks are engaged in a form of communal education. Overall, members demonstrate the development of a complex form of rhetorical empathy through their engagement in r/FundieSnarkUncensored. This rhetorical empathy reshapes their understanding of snark can and should do and what it means to be a snarker in this particular online space. With this dissertation, I contribute to understandings of feminist or proto-feminist rhetorical practices in online communities, with specific attention to storytelling’s role in de-escalating online aggression. I also contribute to the scope of feminist rhetorical research practices by adopting a cultural rhetorics approach and employing both quantitative and qualitative methods.
Read
