The Piano Lab

I spend some time on twitter and see so much junk. Not just shitposting, but actual and metaphorical junk (“pussy in bio”). Most of this is in the replies section to high follower handles, but the quality of tweets does not matter. If a handle has enough followers, the comments are going to be full of junk.

Now I can’t do anything about the literal junk, but there is a second kind of shitposting happening. People making mediocre comments and arguments. Some of it is decent and genuinely curious/involved people. But a lot of it, is also social media warfare, and perhaps people who’re in rabbit holes. For example, twitter handles posting replies to all retweets. Often in an angry tone. Surprisingly, this doesn’t even have to be political. Just anything is fair game in engagement farming.

So, if people ARE doing engagement farming, OR shitposting OR even pussy in bio, the remaining (~60%) of people who just scroll, have to read it. Which is a deterioration of experience and discourse. And honestly engages users in a certain kind of almost isolated/non-engaging cautious or private/sidechat behavior. This is also a problem in group chats. People hijacking group chats, either when they’re themselves in rabbit holes, through their personalities, or just not in good faith. And the rest of us have to scroll through it. Or the chat just dies. With twitter, the chat dying is harder, and you’re likely to continue sifting through written garbage.

Due to some cancelled plans, I had a few hours over Memorial Day weekend, and created this website : showreplies.com

Basically, if you see a tweet but are either intimidated to join the conversation in a meaningful or constructive way OR have a proclivity to shitpost, you can copy the tweet and get a response that you can use. If you’re shitposting for engagement, it may actually drive better engagement for you (shitposting works until you have a reputation, then the base stops growing (unless the platform promotes it for its own numbers)). So, for genuine people who want to have good conversations, I invite you to give it a go. It’s free!

It also works for groupchats (like WhatsApp) – if you really want to respond to someone ‘smartly’ but are afraid, again, give it a try!

The overall idea is for people and handles to get in the habit of posting better replies – ultimately people will not use this anymore, but their own standard will have been set. Secondarily, but equally importantly, it’ll expose us to often missing viewpoints, hopefully making us more patient as populations or groups.

And make our public and semi-public spaces for conversations, better!