Advice entails

• disclosure (“I did this”), followed by
• judgment (“you made a mistake”)
• framing (“you can think about it like this”)
• authority (“in my experience” or “experts believe”)
• suggestion (“you should get counseling”)

The genre’s origins

The first newspaper advice column is widely recognized as John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury of 1690. He tells of walking with friends when “on a sudden I made a stop” and said:

Sirs, I have a thought I will not exchange for 50 guineas… The first hint of it was no more than a confused idea, of concealing the Querist, and answering his Question. (Dunton 1818, p. 188).

The genre, defined

the advice genre includes

venues dedicated to anonymously seeking advice before an audience.

Such venues encompass or specialize in disclosure, judgment, suggestion, and discussion and implicate sociality.

And they always have

(Fake) councils,

the Athenian Society was no more than four of Dunton’s acquaintances with additional fictional personages (Gudelunas 2007, “Confidential to America”, p. 21).

[The Reviews’ letters] were supposedly answered by a learned society, although Defoe’s singular responsibility for the answers was only thinly veiled (McBain 2016, p. 68).

Readers’ parasociality

Though it may seem paradoxical, readers feel a certain kinship with the larger community of other readers while simultaneously experiencing an almost personal relationship with the advice-giver. This distinctive combination of intimacy-community was characteristic of this, the first example of an advice column, and remains characteristic of the genre today (Hendley 1977, p. 347).

Readers’ solidarity

readers also have a sense of the self as socially constructed through [mediated] contact with others who have similar problems. (Grodin 1991, “The interpreting audience”, p. 416).

They do not know one another, but they know of and can identify with one another.

Readers’ interactions

The Boston Globe’s “Confidential Chat” and similar columns created flexible, public, and quasi-anonymous spaces in the newspaper for participants to trade cooking, housekeeping, childcare, and other domestic tips…. loyal readers began sending their own responses to questions; sometimes they even took issue with the guidance provided by the columnist herself. (Golia 2021, “Newspaper confessions”, loc. 21)

The crowds’ comments

The charismatic columnist is supplanted by the cacophony of the crowd and their messages’ karma (i.e., up and down voting).

Advice subreddits’ popularity

• Reddit is a top ten US website, with 22% of Americans reporting visiting the website (Gottfried 2024).
• It claims 70 million daily active users, with 850 million active every month (Curry 2025).
• If any of those viewers visit Reddit’s front page, they will see advice genre forums.
• r/AmItheAsshole is the most viewed subreddit (Staff 2022)
• This is likely on par with the lifetime readerships of “Ask Ann Landers” and “Dear Abby,” around a hundred million each (Anderson 2002; Robbins 2022).
• Reddit advice content is syndicated to millions offsite.

Reddit and syndication

Specialization of function

• disclosure: r/offmychest
• suggestion: r/relationship_advice
• judgment: r/AmItheAsshole
• meta discussion: r/BestofRedditorUpdates

A history in bubbles

A memetic Reddit lineage

Mimetic relationships

• New subreddit branches emerge by being
  • spawned without reference to other subreddits.
  • forked relative to a complementary source subreddit.
  • split as a competitive alternative.
  • transplanted, when an existing subreddit is reconstituted.
• Subreddit branches’ grow toward being
  • specialized on topic, such as advice for different age groups.
  • converged on topic, seen in independent but similar subreddits.
  • differentiated on operation, such as strictness of moderation.

• Existing branches weaken when
  • overshadowed by successors.
  • pruned or removed by administrators.
  • wilted or abandoned by most mods and users.
• Subreddit branches are cultivated when
  • filtered, such as for the most controversial posts.
  • compiled from multiple posts and comments.
  • syndicated offsite, such as by TikTokers and podcasters. (Reagle 2025)

Mimetic relationships

1. The role of the audience is essential to the definition of the advice genre; the exchange between querist and advisor is the seed of a larger sociality.
2. The genre is most vital on Reddit, where memetic evolution has reconfigured the genre, including the specialization of the functions disclosure, judgment, suggestion, and meta discussion and syndication.

Thanks!