Thread by @visakanv

i’m continually fascinated by the phenomenon of people deliberately sharing content that in the same tweet, they describe as cursed, disgusting, gross, terrible and so on. i’d like a pithy phrase to point at this

There’s a spectrum, ranging from fun and silly harmless stuff– eg QTing your friend’s post jokingly with “delete this”, and maybe at the opposite end?– maybe there’s a 2x2 here?– antagonistically QTing “shut the fuck up”, probably meant to incite dunks and mockery

The inciting tweet for this was someone sharing a screenshot of an ad from Instagram with “this is so cursed” – I can’t actually tell whether the person thinks the ad is bad, whether they know that they’re doing free additional advertising. My guess is they probably don’t care

which then gets me thinking about the degree of responsibility people feel for shaping community norms. I think a significant % of smaller accounts– not sure what % tho – simply don’t feel responsible at all. And maybe in analysing this we should evaluate account size/reach

I think another thing I want to consider is the intent in posting. Sometimes people post stuff with the intent of making their friends groan, it’s very clear. Navigating this well can be fun and a demonstration of social awareness. Comedic groan-surfing. Thx frye for a great eg

https://twitter.com/__frye/status/1468974139373277192

here are a few tweets from a thread about cringe in American politics/memetics, which I think illustrates a strain of what I’m trying to make sense of

but this is still not the full spectrum – in the “mainstream political memes” discourse I think there’s an established norm of cringing at your political opponents (and on the left, cringing at your own, lol) but I’d say it’s sort of, business as usual, “just how people talk”…