Loneliness on Reddit - a qualitative netnography

Abstract

This thesis is a about what people write when they are posting about their own loneliness online. Loneliness has been labeled as a public health crisis and the efforts to combat it as well as research about it has been on the rise in the last two decades. Loneliness is a phenomenon where a person does not get enough of social connectedness with other people and this is something all people are susceptible to, disregarding age, gender, and background. The effects of loneliness can be detrimental to a person’s mental and physical health. The aim of this thesis is to look at the way how people write about their loneliness in their own setting. For this aim, 50 posts were gathered from a Finnish-language community, on the web platform Reddit. The posts were searched with the keywords “lonely” and “loneliness” and then manually sorted to only include posts where the poster is writing about their own personal loneliness in some way. These posts were then analyzed for common themes. A set of five common themes were found: seeking advice, peer support, mental health, relocating and substances. All posts analyzed contained at least one of these themes, with peer support being the most prevalent one. These themes give insight into how people write about their loneliness and what are common aspects within these posts.