From Restaurant-Review Warnings to Collective Empowerment: How Discourse Strategies Function in an Online Community of Practice

Abstract

Restaurant-review warning has become a prominent user-generated content genre on Xiaohongshu. In this genre, consumers share negative dining experiences and warn others about potential consumption risks. Drawing on a cleaned dataset of 48,359 comments from 70 highly interactive posts, this study adopts a mixed-methods approach to examine discourse strategies in commercial complaint interactions. The findings identify two major categories of discourse strategies: solidarity building strategies and dispute oriented strategies. These strategies construct alignment, negotiate norms, and manage interaction within the community. Conversation analysis of highly interactive comment threads further reveals four recurrent interaction patterns: empathic cohesion, humorous boundary marking, dispute and negotiation, and issue escalation. These patterns illustrate how individual complaints are transformed into shared knowledge, negotiated norms, and forms of discursive collective empowerment through interaction. From an applied linguistics perspective, this study demonstrates how discourse strategies contribute to community construction in digitally mediated environments. The findings also contribute to research on online discourse and complaint pragmatics.