What is “Useful” on Social Media?

If you have thousands of people on your friends list, and thousands more following, and commit to interacting, you’ll get swallowed up without some sort of sorting mechanism. It might be wise to constantly test different arguments and philosophical gambits, watching to see which conversations ever evolve into anything interesting. If you try one twenty times, at least one of them needs to end up somewhere positive. Below a 5% positive rate, what precisely are you doing? Your task is to learn how to recognize poisoned fruit when you taste it…and then to recognize the seeds.

Everyone will have to decide these things in their own time, in their own way, according to their own values. But it might be interesting to list a few of the “red flags” which suggest I’m on a dead-end road. DANGER WILL ROBINSON!

Remember: these are not all indications that there is anything wrong with the person. They are indications that the conversation has less than 5% chance of evolving into anything.

1. Discourtesy. They have to be polite. No name-calling. No straight-up insult UNLESS BOTH PARTIES SEEM TO BE ENJOYING IT. Some people just love fighting. I understand that. So I’ll let people go, a bit.
2. Believing in things I’m willing to bet are…irrational. The example I use is “Flat Earther”. I’m not amused by mental illness, and I consider that a matter of inability to build a model of reality from easily available data points. While political affiliation has never been a trigger here, there are a few…