There's a frustrating tendency on Twitter (and social media in general, I suppose) to let the half-baked ravings of a single banal dipstick overtake large swaths of the ecosystem for hours or days at a time. Algorithms that run on keeping you lashed to the app reward performative rage and poorly considered statements that incite that rage, so this occurs basically by design.

And it's a design that makes you do something... dumb. Just dumb. Just hair-eating nonsense. You're just packing handfuls into your mouth straight off the barbershop floor. And I'm no role model, I went through a phase when I did the same damn thing. When I still used Twitter, obviously, which I no longer do. I didn't do this the whole time I was there, either. Why would anyone once they realize how fucking goofy it is? How's it so goofy? Well, let me lay out some key points using the example of something my corner of Twitter loved to get its tits twisted up about: Whether or not it is morally or intellectually acceptable for people over 18 to consume anything fanciful or interesting.

Point The First: You probably JUST learned this person is alive at all.

It's wild to consider, I know, but most people on the internet are extremely obscure and don't hold any real sway over your day to day life. When you try to start a fight with someone paid in dimes by some dusty-ass thinkpiece factory to opine about how all adults who read comic books are learning disabled child molesters, what you're doing is yelling down a dark hole at some nobody who for all intents and purposes doesn't even exist to you. Whatever wack thing they think, they can keep right on thinking it (or claiming to think it, because that's what the client wants) without affecting you one bit. Unless you, you know, take it on as an ego wound and make your entire day about screaming down that hole.

Lots and lots of people you don't know say and believe wack shit, and unless you're Terminally Online they're just going to sit around farting in their hands and smelling it without you ever knowing.

Point The Second: TO WHAT END?

My own impulse to engage with this stuff didn't survive long after I realized, “Oh. I have nothing to prove to someone like this.”

Social media is, by design, an emotional and reactionary environment that feeds off your need to collect validation and approval, and it's most probable that you don't need those things from these people. If you read Harry Potter and have several degrees, that's great for you and ought to speak for itself to an audience of people who can accept that that's possible. You won't gain a whole lot by trying to convince some hand-sniffing rando to whom you will never again speak.

What's more, the likelihood of your converting this person is basically nil. This is due to the very nature of dumb takes that blow up on social media: They are emotional, reactionary, and poorly-considered. You're not reasoning with some social scientist who has years of hard data on what insatiable, violent sex monsters college students who watch Adventure Time are. Instead, you're more likely to be shouting at some insecure hand-sniffer for whom “I don't watch Star Wars, I'm smart and love the Lord, everyone who watches Star Wars is dumb and bad,” is an emotionally necessary personal narrative. This does suck, but it doesn't have to suck for you.

Point The Final: All you're doing is telling Twitter to hurt you more.

Social media lies when it tells you it gathers information to give you a 'better' experience. In a fair world, 'better' would be a word carefully monitored for misuse in corporate copy. Twitter isn't learning what you like, it's learning what gets you to react and keep using the app and consuming the ads. When you engage in ego-protective dogpiles on hurtful ideas, all you're telling Twitter is, “This works. More this. More the things my friends yell about and quote-tweet Sick Dunks of so I can never escape it. More. More. I love MTN Dew.”

It's the effectiveness of slapping people in the neck with these ideas that makes them profitable to content farms in the first place, and that's ultimately the reason you see them linked and screenshat all over your timeline. Making emotional, unsupported claims about wide swaths of people gets those people to come out and defend themselves and everyone who agrees with you to come out and gloat. It doesn't make good material or a healthy environment. It just makes more money for ad companies.