"You Need to Drop the App": Online Community Responses to Teens' Disclosures of Overreliance on AI Companion Chatbots

Key Findings

• — 973 comment trees from 144 Reddit posts by self-identified teens about overreliance on Character.AI were coded for response type.
• — Informational and emotional support were the dominant responses, with dismissive or mocking comments also present.
• — Support style varied with problem framing: posts describing withdrawal or excessive use elicited advice and behavioural strategies, while relapse-oriented posts elicited emotional reassurance and esteem affirmation.
• — The authors read the threads as communities constructing norms around responsibility, addiction and recovery in companion ecosystems, and suggest platforms could scaffold framing-sensitive peer support while preserving privacy and avoiding engagement-oriented interventions.
• — The companion short paper (same authors, same corpus) reports that when commenters discussed responsibility they most often assigned it to parents and platform companies rather than to the teens, framing parents as gatekeepers and criticising platform design while debating teen autonomy.

Methodology Notes

Qualitative coding of Reddit comment trees responding to teen self-disclosures on r/CharacterAI; self-identification of age is unverified and the sample is platform-selected. Published 2026-07-21 in the CUI 2026 proceedings (pp. 1 to 16, CC BY 4.0, NSF-funded) per Crossref; dl.acm.org is unreachable from this workspace, so verification used Crossref metadata (title, authors, affiliations, date, license) and the OpenAlex deposited abstract; full text not read. Sibling of the same group's CHI 2026 paper on the teens' own narratives (held separately) and of the six-page CUI short paper on responsibility attribution (DOI 10.1145/3816046.3816287), folded here.

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