Commenting on social media

While I’m more off than on in terms of my consumption of social media nowadays, I find myself commenting less and less nowadays.

I’ve stopped commenting on blogs because I primarily consume them using an RSS reader (Feedly) on my iPad, and need to click through and use my iPad keyboard to leave comments, a hard exercise. And comments on this blog make me believe that it’s okay to not comment on blogs any more.

On Facebook, I leave the odd comment but find that most comments add zero value. “Oh, looking so nice” and “nice couple” and things like that which might flatter some people, but which make absolutely no sense once you start seeing through the flattery.

So the problem on Facebook is “congestion”, where a large number of non-value-adding comments may crowd out the odd comment that actually adds value, so you as a value-adding-commentor decide to not comment at all.

The problem on LinkedIn is that people use it mostly as a medium to show off (that might be true of all social media, but LinkedIn is even more so), and when you leave a comment there, you’re likely to attract a large number of show-offers who you are least interested in talking to. Again, there’s the Facebook problem here in terms of congestion. There is also the problem that if you leave a comment on LinkedIn, people might think you’re showing off.

Twitter, in that sense, is good in that you can comment and selectively engage with people who reply to your comment (on Facebook, when all replies are in one place, such selective engagement is hard, and you can offend people by ignoring them). You can occasionally attract trolls, but with a judicious combination of ignoring, muting and blocking, those can be handled.

However, in my effort to avoid outrage (I like to consume news but don’t care about random people’s comments on it), I’ve significantly pruned my following list. Very few “friends”. A few “twitter celebrities”. Topic-specific studs. The problem there is that you can leave comments, but when you see that nobody is replying to them, you lose interest!

So it’s Jai all over the place.

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