Piling On: Ruining Social Media
Posted on July 6th, 2018
In football, piling on is a penalty. It is when players jump on top of another player or players after the tackle is already made. The play has ended. Diving on after it is absolutely useless. The way I see it, people on social media who make comments to a post, without having taken the time to read the other comments, are guilty of piling on. They should be punished severely.
Maybe it is the teacher in me. I always hated it when my students raised their hands to try and answer my question with the same answer some other student had just given. They obviously weren't paying attention. In the same way, there is no need for a few hundred people to give the same answer or comment to a social media post. Read what is already there, and add something new.
My mother taught my sister and me to avoid "butting into" other people's conversations. If you haven't been there to here all of the discussion, you have no idea whether or not your input is redundant. Repeating things that were already mentioned only serves to irritate the original members of the conversation.
I'll give you an example. If I post the question "Where can I get good breakfast tacos in San Antonio?", I don't need for a hundred people to say, "Mariposa's Taco Joint on Tex Mex Drive". If you think Mariposa's has the best tacos, you can show that you agree by liking it in Facebook and Twitter. In some forums that don't have a liking function, it is acceptable to post "X2" to show your agreement. But, who wants to scroll through twenty minutes of the same answer?
The way I see it, repeating the same answer over and over is just wasting my time as a reader and making it harder for the original poster to sort through the answers.