A Pilot Study on People's Views of Gratitude Practices and Reactions to Expressing Gratitude in an Online Community

Abstract

Online communities play an increasingly important role in forming and maintaining relationships, but have also been criticized for their negative effects such as decreased mental well-being, reduced in-person social connections, and the spread of misinformation. This works-in-progress paper describes formative work towards designing online communities centered on gratitude, in which we elicited views on gratitude and on expressing gratitude within online communities. We found that people have unique views of and contexts for gratitude and discussed how the unique views and contexts relate to concerns they have around expressing gratitude in an online community. We describe plans for a follow-up study to better understand people's views on expressing gratitude in an online community through the use of Gratitude, a simple online communal gratitude platform where users interact in ways similar to many online communities, through creating short posts (e.g., notes of gratitude) that other members can browse, react to, and comment on.