I'm 99 percent sure hot take havers are like, yeah I could add nuance/context but then it won't go viral

thoughts from a not clouty individual

I'm gonna type this post on my phone. I'm on my phone anyway. I'm distracted. I've been on my phone all day but I’m not talking to anyone. I’m not even replying to texts really. Just on my phone. Looking at social media. Getting angry at people getting away with showing their ass. Replying to comments. Generally being a wasteoid.

Is wasteoid a word? There's no red underline when I type it out so it's a word according to Gmail, which is where I am typing this post on my phone. I’m not even typing, just swiping using the gboard on my Android phone. I love swiping and I would be annoyed to have to type out words using my thumbs if i had an iphone but I've gotta say the swipes don't always get it right. Roughly one out of ten of my tweets have a typo in them because I swiped quickly and didn't proofread before posting. Absolutely hate it when that happens. If I can catch it quick enough I'll delete and swipe again, this time more carefully, but if someone likes it before I can delete then I just gotta let it hang. 

Do you ever feel like you have no idea what people are talking about? I feel like that whenever I’m online. I’ll just be scrolling and then stop to read someone else’s post and be like, what the hell are you talking about?

Sometimes when I’m curious enough I will start looking into whatever the subject is that I’m perplexed about to get the backstory or to read the definition and gain some understanding of what’s being discussed. It’s fascinating how an unfamiliar word or name can be a passport to a new world. The fact that so many people know things and have opinions and think about complex subjects in their free time will never cease to amaze me. I mean, think about it, everyone in the world thinking about stuff and having their own ideas about things, everyone in the world with their own version of reality.

Recently one of my facebook friends casually used the word “intersubjectivity” in a post and my first thought was is this common knowledge, like I wonder how many people read this post and knew what intersubjectivity is and my second thought was to just friggin google the word. After reading the definition and getting a brief history on this term from social science (intersubjectivity relates to people’s mutual understanding and agreement of situations/objects, but it goes a lot deeper than that) I realized that this is a subject I already think about and have been writing about and now I plan on learning more about it. I have a hard time reading philosophy, but I’m gonna try.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we relate to other people online, how we share our ideas, how we receive information, and naturally the way we deliver hot takes. I think I prefer unpopular opinions to hot takes because I’m almost positive that hot takes are written with the primary intent of sowing discord (jesus christ, I hate that tech companies can just use real words as their brandnames and not even bother to cuteify the spelling so that when you google the word, such as discord, to confirm you are using it correctly the whole first page is just links related to the software and not the word it stole from). Unpopular opinions seem to be more self aware in that the unpopular opinion haver knows that not everyone feels this way about whatever subject is being discussed, there’s context.

Hot takes don’t require nuance or context. Hot takes are short and hashtag brave statements that derive from anecdotal experience and get applied broadly to entire subsets of people or whatever is being opined (but it’s usually about other people which is why the hot take fails because people are super complex and cannot be summed up succinctly with a nice bow on top). I’ve seen shitty hot takes about mental health, race, sexuality, poverty and just about any super complicated and multifacted subject you can think of. If the hot take sharer is any kind of clouty then there’s a good chance that the hot take will go viral. I have no idea how this works and if everyone resharing the bad hot take is doing so earnestly or out of schadenfreude for the poor fool who put their bad opinion out into the public.

Relatedly, I’ve been thinking about the way we argue after some altright chucklefuck called me a troll (lol, I am but not for this reason) because I said his friend’s anti-mask comic was dumb. The chucklefuck was all over the comments telling people to calm down and reminding them that “it’s a joke!” The guy who made the comic was increasingly defensive and kept saying he had the right to share his opinion. Well my guy, of course you do, but that right to share your opinion extends to everyone and means that other people are just as right to share their opinions. The fact that other people are disagreeing with your opinion does not imply censorship or gatekeeping. That’s freedom of speech, baby!

If you put your idea out into a public forum there’s a good chance that someone might not like your idea. It happens. People are complex and unpredictable and everyone’s got an opinion. The trick is to not get defensive if someone disagrees with you or points out a flaw in your logic. It’s a lesson I’ve learned over time the hard way. I don’t spend my free time reading 4chan forums and comment thread trainwrecks just to be a shit arguer on the internet.

I don’t know how to end this and this post is overdue so I’ll just say, thanks for reading I love you <3