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It fascinates me how some people on social media nowadays actively seem to be weirded out when you attempt to actively interact with them, or to reply to their posts - as if they assume it’s a broadcast-first medium.

I primarily use social media because I genuinely talking with and meeting new people, and I do at least try to read and reply to all interactions. I find it interesting how many comments I’ve received from other social media users about how apparently unusual my online behavior is in 2026.

I’ve always been a comparatively pretty high-active-engagement (IE, posting and replying, not just scrolling) social media, user, since I was a kid - but I do find it somewhere in between fascinating and alarming that being as active as I am appears to be becoming increasingly unusual.

Of course, the flip-side of this is that it also feels like when people do engage with your posts on social media in 2026, many replies increasingly read like they’re written by people who either aren’t totally literate or didn’t actually read your post and are just responding to a couple key words.

The falloff in literacy on Reddit post-modpocalypse (we left, still homeless) is shocking, to say the least. Twitter specific jonestown koolaid plus very early AI writing overtaking the browser intrrnet, plus earlier recession of any elevated magazines as a form, has ocean-trench'd the lexical mind

This is absolutely true on a platform level, but there are definitely smaller communities (subreddits, Discords) that have a much higher level of productive and intelligent engagement. Usually, it's an outgrowth of more active moderation, which is more workable at smaller scales.

ConwayLife is a very good community that's also had productive research done on it "What's that?" Exactly

Language Hat is a very good community that has also had productive research done on it unfortunately it's also hosted in the blog comments of a single increasingly elderly blogger, and I really don't want to imagine the fate of that community if anything significantly bad ever happens to that guy

I of course have zero issue with people who prefer to lurk on social media (and I guess I’m OK with the broadcast-only crowd, even if I don’t get it). But serious communication issues can arise because it’s hard to tell who’s in what camp - and too few who don’t want interaction turn off replies.

It’s terrifying to share this belief and then see Jamelle and Stancil’s replies

and i might be misremembering but i don't recall it being that bad (at least for men) on old-twitter.

For men yes

aw, shucks maybe some subreddits?

Yeah, it's depressing how it seems like modern social media has trained a lot of people to not think and have short attention spans on it. And I agree that it's better here than elsewhere. There's too much reward for knee-jerk, feel-good pandering/hate posting, and too little for thoughtfulness.