Unpopular Opinons

Re: tone tag discussion from earlier in the thread

I think tone tags had the potential to be useful, and in some cases they are, but it's a very flawed system that requires mutual understanding on what the tag abbreviations mean and trust that they aren't lying about the tone they're really trying to convey.

Nobody is going to remember an ever-growing, ever-changing list of tone tag abbreviations, especially if one group might have different meanings assigned to them. Even if you did, there is never going to be a mutual understanding of what some of them actually mean. For example, I have seen people trying to describe what "half-joking" means, and everyone has a different answer. Some tags like that just muddy the water and create subtle social cues that go against the intended use entirely (like how some people use /hj to mean "I mean this seriously but I'm softening the blow so you don't get too upset", kind of like how people end statements with lol or say "lowkey" when expressing feelings/boundaries/opinions.)

The internet also lies. A lot. People have intentionally misused tone tags for joke purposes (using /srs on a joke/sarcastic post). While some people can tell it's a joke, others can't, which waters down the concept of the tags in the first place.

I've also encountered people overusing tags. Like, I'm autistic and sometimes I have trouble figuring out if someone's joking or not over text, but you don't have to use them in every message, especially when it wouldn't make sense to take a message's tone as anything but face value. "Thank you!/gen /pos /nj" just feels condescending and irritating. I've seen this a lot less over the years, but when it first got popularized on social media it was quite an issue.

The original XML tags are a lot better and depending on what spaces you're in they're less likely to suffer from intentional misuse since in my experience people tend to be a bit more mature and less malicious/trolly in forums rather than social media (I think it's because people on forums are more focused on getting a message across, whereas places like Twitter have more of an incentive to joke around because short form posts create a more relaxed culture and it's easy to go viral if you're funny), but the chances are still nonzero.

Since I'm here, my own unpopular opinion would be that people need to either stop filming in public or at the very least angle the phone in a way that won't show people's faces. I don't want to be in the background of your TikTok dance. Other people could potentially be at risk if their face shows up online, like if they're a stalking/abuse victim. I think the modern internet incentivizes sharing personal information wayyyy too much, and it's definitely for data collection purposes. I wish more people would recognize that and think twice before posting their face and real name. It's gotten to a point where people will post photos/videos of other people without their permission and more often than not it's because they want to bully them without saying anything directly to them because they're spineless and have no real lives outside of social media. Even if it's not for bullying purposes, it's still weird because of the lack of consent!