"I dunno" by Brad Frost http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/i-dunno/
I think one phenomenon of social media is that many blog posts are written for a particular purpose: either marketing (pro-something) or a hatchet job (anti-something). When people read your writing, they might try to lump it into one of these categories, and then use it as a totem to start arguing for one position or the other.
I've experienced this many times: the feeling of being made a caricature for the benefit of someone else's argument.
The marketing posts exists because, well, that's the business model of social media. The hatchet job posts exist because controversy is a reliable way to get eyeballs, which is the business model of most of the web. Corral both of these groups into an angry thread where they take a swing at each other, and you've also got a recipe for keeping eyeballs on the social media site itself.
In short, it feels like conflict is endemic to social media.
Stuff that doesn't play well to a social media crowd:
- Fred Rogers-like compassion and sincerity
- nuance and subtlety
- admitting you're wrong
- humility
- having a debate where the goal is to make progress rather than win
- communicating that an idea may be more complex than just black-and-white
- longform writing that isn't broken up into short quips
The irony here is that I'm on Mastodon (a social media platform) largely because I dislike social media. Mastodon is the only one I use.
I like to believe we're building something better here, but something I look around at the way people treat each other and I'm not so sure.
All I can do is try to boost/write the kind of stuff I would like to see more of on social media. Be the change you wanna see, yada yada. Fin.
@nolan unfortunately people are people. There's also the problem that once a social network get big enough it stops being a party with your friends and a few new people and turns into a stadium filled with football (soccer) hooligans.
