I’ve never liked the idea of Twitter. I’m on it-“professional presence,” I guess, and I wanted to see what it was about-but honestly, most of my exposure to Twitter as a reader consisted of people screaming past each other. I don’t enjoy intense, pointless emotion, so Twitter was never very appealing to me.

Honestly, I blamed the platform: “This place is broken by design!” A few days ago, though, it hit me: Maybe the design only amplifies what we already do to each other.

The site isn’t doing it wrong - we are.

The Problem

Twitter’s original character limit could have been beautiful discipline. When you write, it’s important to zero in on what you want to say first - get your thesis out there, refine, and clarify, but that thesis is what you have to write. A character limit has the potential to make you zero in on what you want to say.

Instead we discovered a dopamine loop. Outrage causes engagement, which feeds a dopamine addiction; who needs time for nuance when we can get those precious clicks? Who needs humanity and understanding when we can show off how many likes we got? We defined our rewards in terms of engagement, not in how we were able to communicate with each other.

Because of the engagement loop - a toxic process, mind - we learned to read a stranger’s micro‑statement as their personal gospel, or heresy. There’s no margin for “Maybe they meant…” because that threatens the dopamine cycle, and the tragedy of the commons implies that if we don’t lean into overreaction, someone else will, and they will get all those clicks.

I’ve been on both ends of it. I imagine any of us who’ve spent any time on social media have seen it live and in person - maybe even done to us, or we’ve done it to someone else - and if we’ve not been on social media, it’s easy to find stories on the Internet using examples from real life.

Where We Are Now

Threads, Facebook, Reddit, Mastodon, BlueSky - every one of these sites inherits the reflex. They’re all built on the same statement/response pattern. The size of the statement won’t help, because we’ve learned a pattern of how to read social media, and a long post doesn’t change how people ingest information. Only we can do that, and we’re busy counting likes.

The Discipline We’re Missing

I don’t have a real solution, but I do have some personal rules. They work when I remember to use them:

  1. Ask before aiming. If a post makes me angry, I want to stop and think. I try to figure out what they could have meant - good, bad, indifferent - and why they might have said something that was so different from how see the world. Most of the time, what makes me angry is based on someone saying something I did not understand, or they’re saying it using a personal history of which I am not aware, and if I knew, i might understand them better… and I can always ask.

  2. Avoid the communities that create harm. I don’t actually like writing on Twitter, because it doesn’t even give me the chance to write with nuance. If I post on Twitter, it’s got to be something simple, clear… and benign. If I can’t put it all out there in a couple of short sentences, it’s the wrong medium.

  3. Weasel words are important. It’s very easy to find examples where people frame categorical statements: “Jews think this!” “White people are racist!” And that’s… just stupid. Some Jews might think that. (Given that Jews are, indeed, people, chances are that some Jews do think that, whatever it is.) Some white people are racist. But “some” and “might” and “could” are important words and we, as writers, have learned to avoid them. But they do heavy, necessary lifting, by observing truth: not everyone fits every description!

Can This Work?

I can’t pretend that a few polite questions will cure the internet. I personally have a hard time interacting in public on sites like Twitter and Facebook; on sites where I do interact, I tend to hide behind a veneer of anonymity. But I do try to maintain a sense of humane kindness: I try to avoid damning people in my writing, even if I have no respect for the subjects in question.

As a result, little of my content trends. I had to decide what was important to me, and “trending” wasn’t it. It couldn’t be. I choose to try to plant tiny seeds of humanity everywhere when I write in public, with the hope that someday, someone might be inspired to apply that same approach themselves, in their own way. And if enough of us practice kindness, who knows, maybe we’ll create enough motion to “move the needle,” as it were, such that other people want to join the movement towards humanity if only to preserve their own sanity.

Leaving the Fire Warmer

I’m not handing Twitter (or its spiritual clones) a free pass. Design nudged us toward the cheap high, accidentally or intentionally, and it still does. But the inflection points are up to us.

Conversation was never intended to be a scoreboard. If we bring curiosity and intent, we may eventually see enough humanity in each other to respond in manners that we’re proud to tell our children about.