Oversharing as topic negotiation in threaded social media discourse: Evidence from Xiaohongshu (Red)

Abstract

This study examines oversharing, the disclosure of personal or affective information that exceeds contextual expectations, as an interactional practice in social media discourse. Adopting a discourse-pragmatic perspective, this study shifts attention from individual intention to interactional recognition and analyzes how boundary-crossing talk is oriented to and evaluated in comment-thread interactions on Xiaohongshu (Red), a major Chinese platform. Based on 50 conversation threads, the analysis identifies five recurrent types of oversharing: over-solicitation, over-disclosure, over-directive, over-evaluation, and over-interpretation, and explores their distribution and co-occurrence. The findings show that oversharing often stretches or departs from the topical frame established by the original post, creating moments of disalignment but also opportunities for topic and participation renegotiation. Thus, oversharing emerges not only as a source of pragmatic tension but also as a resource for interactional management. The study contributes to understanding how excessive or misaligned sharing shapes interactional trajectories, offering insights into participation management, coherence, and pragmatic challenges in online communication.