Never Care For What They Say ? Platform vs Genre Rules in Online Horror Narratives (2007-2024)

Research on online cultural production shows that platforms are acting as mediators that can heavily shape textual form. Yet, empirical work is often platform-bounded, making it difficult to assess whether stylistic regularities that we observe are indeed genre signals or if some of them are platform artefacts. We address this question through a cross-platform design focused on creepypasta, a digital-born horror genre circulating across heterogeneous infrastructures. Using a corpus of ∼23,000 Englishlanguage stories published from 2007 to 2024 on Reddit's /r/nosleep and the Creepypasta Fandom wiki, we compare stylistic profiles across platforms and relate them to differences in rule regimes and moderation practices, established through qualitative extraction and close reading of platform guidelines. Across readability indices, lexical diversity measures, syntactic proxies, and a cross-fit feature-based model, we find that platform membership leaves only a narrow stylistic imprint, largely reducible to a single architectural rule: r/NoSleep's mandatory first-person narration. Beyond this constraint, differences are modest and fail to form coherent platform-specific stylistic signatures. This helps us define what is stylistically common in creepypastas, and understand what the genre is to its writers beyond the topics it deals with or the platform it is written on.