Non-Advising Responses to Advice-Seeking on Xiaohongshu

As for research on advice pragmatics, tingquan (taking advice) is an unexplored trend, where beauty is a novel topic that abounds with intercultural responses. Although much good work has been done on sequential organization in online interactions, current studies seldom focus on sequential incoherence in advice-seeking posts, especially those in newer platforms, and lack in-depth analysis on to what extent the second pair part does not align with the first one. Drawing upon the Conversation Analytic notions of affiliation and alignment (Stivers, 2008; Stivers et al., 2011), this study chose hot tingquan-related posts from Xiaohongshu, a new leading social media and lifestyle platform in China, and aimed to examine responses to advice-seeking that do not give advice. The findings show that, while direct advice accounted for roughly a half, non-advising responses occupied a large proportion, providing encouragement, assessment, referral and related experience. Besides, while many non-advising responses aligned with the overall activity with an affiliative/neutral stance, a large number of non-aligning ones denied the validity of advice-seeking for supportive compliment and humor. Compared with replies to foreign users, replies to Chinese users were more direct and less polite, and contain more assessment, referral, and memes from the context of Chinese digital culture. To some extent, this study can shed light on tingquan as an ongoing trend.