I Kinda Hate Vague Posting

See more in this series: I Kinda Hate Everything About Tech, and I Kinda Hate the Internet Now.

There’s a clear, indisputable moment when the Internet started to lose its shine (read: turn to shit), a point when most of the websites and apps connected to it started to lose any utility they once had.

The move to engagement metrics.

When views, clicks, likes, subscribers, shares and comments became the connective tissue of online activity, dictating what was hot or not and what made the cut on our algorithmically driven feeds, and the North Star that determined a company’s stock value, everything began to lose its value. It’s a decline that shows no signs of stopping. Even our art, films, music and writing have gone this way — hey, slander! Writing is not content, I hear you say. It’s on a higher plane! Well, it is content as it’s created to be consumed, and don’t give me the “I write for myself” argument. Wait, where was I going with this? — with media now measured in “minutes watched,” “monthly listens” and “page views.”

It’s the metrics, not the moments, that matter.

When the primary motivation for creating and sharing anything online became chasing some form of virality, the soul got ripped out. The result? Tired copy-cat formats. Trends that are here today, gone in 2 minutes. Paint by numbers output designed to appeal to everyone. Rage baiting. A plague of advertising and paywalls. Eating fucking Tide pods. Airing extreme opinions. The sexualisation of almost everything (and everyone). Marginalisation. People revealing things to random strangers with microphone that would have previously been secrets taken to the grave. Whack-job conspiracy theories. Basically, everything that now makes the Internet a pretty shitty place to spend any time.

But there’s one pet hate more than any other that makes my left eye twitch ever so slightly with fury.

Vague posting.

If you know, you know.

I was going to leave you cold there. I thought it would be a funny, ironic joke. But, if you hate vague posting as much as me, I worried you’d be heading for the exit door in a tailspin of fury.

So I’ll end with the little bit of context that so many now leave out.

I hate it because it has made everything so vapid. So empty. So pointless. It’s nothing more than a stupid, obvious engagement bait trick that turns any comments or forum into people asking for more — that’s the point — and with many of the commenters also vague posting in response, in the end, it renders the whole post or thread a waste of oxygen, all spurred on by desperate platforms offering a few cents to desperate blue check badges Muskies who are then incentivised to drive any engagement by any means necessary.

That’s why paying creators to post/create doesn’t work. It always descends into gamesmanship and algorithm-juicing, posts that refuse to say anything meaningful. They don’t inform. They don’t teach. They don’t connect. And that’s to the detriment of the platforms and the users.

It’s the antithesis to social communication, to human connection. We’re so worried right now about AI and the invasion of bots, we forget that we, the users, are also the reason everything is becoming more and more unusable.