When diving into the world of podcasts about strange towns and posts about monsters, the most interesting thing to consider is the point of view that the creator puts the reader in. Are you learning about someone else and their story? Or, even more interestingly, are you learning about yours?
In Welcome to Night Vale, the podcast (or radio show) host, Cecil talks directly to the listener, reporting the events and strange happenings in the town of Night Vale. Be it a giant glow cloud, the lights above the Arby's, or the opening of the new dog park (NO ONE is allowed to even go there, so don't even think about the dog park, okay?) Cecil talks to you, the listener reporting events only partially unbiased. The best part of being spoken to by a character on the radio show is that it puts you in the center of the action. You could almost close your eyes and imagine that everything happening in the town is happening to you. Listening to Welcome to Night Vale is like listening to news radio and looking out the window to confirm that yes, there is some weird storm approaching from the vast desert just outside of town.
On the other side of my microblog posts, we have the tale of the terrifying Slenderman. A tall faceless creature stalks the main character through the safety of their own home. Their tendrils slipping through the cracks in the door, following you up the stairs, and ultimately rendering you helpless in the dark of the night. It's easy to get wrapped up in this story as if you're living it yourself without any extra character interaction besides the nameless main character and the monster on the other side of the door.
Something that a lot of online story readers enjoy is to be able to be a character in their favorite story universe. In a typical fan fiction, or original story, a lot of writers will make the main character nameless and without much description so that the reader can put themselves in the shoes of the main character. While the slenderman post on the creepypasta website that has been provided to us the gender of the main character, they still manage to leave a lot of description out. So this story has a great effect on female readers, by putting them in the shoes of the main character. I first read this creepypasta years ago in the back of my high school physics class, we sat in the dark, my fellow classmates watched Big Bang Theory on the projector (for some reason we spent an unnecessary amount of time watching that show) I had a seat in the very back corner of the class. I liked to watch scary movies on my phone and was mostly unphased. For some reason, being put in the shoes of the character that was being followed through the safety of my own home by the tall faceless creature made my skin crawl.
The point of view that you are given by the story sometimes makes the story that much more interesting. For example, reading The Hunger Games makes you feel like part of the audience watching the games. If the whole story was told in the first person, and we read it as if it was us fighting to the death, the story might take on a completely different face. The terror might feel that much more real. Welcome to Nightvale does a great job of putting you in the position of a townsperson, which is nice, but feeling as if the story is more specific to you, like in the tale of the slenderman, makes the story more personal, and even more real to the reader. Being included in a literary universe has always been a huge thing for me as a reader. It helps me feel like I'm taking place in something larger than myself.. Although I think I would rather not live out the tale of the Slenderman.