#generational divide

Unpopular opinion time.

I've never liked these things, but someone sent me this and I finally gotta rant.

The writer who got these comments thought this commenter (and let's be honest, it was probably a kid) was calling them a "piece of shit". Multiple times.

And they were so confused.

Y'all. Please say what you mean. Spell it out. This isn't twitter, you don't have to shorten every single word.

Tone indicators are niche. If not niche, they're a generational thing that people in their 10s and early 20s somehow assume everyone else is gonna know. But there are so many tone indicators to commit to memory. Most people aren't going to have the time, want to make the effort, or could have memory issues that keep them from memorizing all these things, and it gets even harder because the rules are so inconsistent in the first place.

What do I mean? Well:

"/hj" is an abbreviation of two words. And it means "half joking". So this means all tone indicators are abbreviations, right? Nope. "/pos" is just a single word, "positive". It's not, in fact, an abbreviation that means "piece of shit".

Or "point of sale". Or any other abbreviation you would think.

In other words: just because you know a few tone indicators, that doesn't mean you can infer what another one means. Is it an abbreviation? Just the beginning of a single word? You don't know. You gotta go out of your way to look it up online. It kinda defeats the purpose of tone indicators, which is to streamline things and prevent confusion.

Neurodivergent? Find it helpful or fun to label your sentences? Has your social circle learned them all? Okay. But please, please reconsider doing this with random strangers online. You don't know their age, you don't know what spaces they frequent, you don't know anything about them. More often than not, it's just gonna lead to confusion. And the big one:

It's not as popular outside your friend groups or demographic as you think.

We throw around shibboleths, specific insults and phrases and jokes, with our friends all the time. If a person jokingly tells their best friend they're going to smack them, the context is pretty different from telling their sister. You gotta understand that your context =/= everyone else's context. You're not the first group to invent "pos" as a shorthand. It's used for a lot of stuff. People are going to contextualize it differently because it's not clear enough to break through that contextual barrier as-is. Especially if, when you remove the tone indicator, the sentence alone sounds almost hostile, or even just ambiguous. Adding /pos onto an ambiguous sentence, to someone unfamiliar with tone indicators, can easily tip it into "this person sounds like they're insulting me" territory.

And it's different from slang. Even my parents know what "based" means. That's because that stuff comes up in everyday conversation, and it can be used verbally (making use of expression and body language and tone of voice to cement the intention), and in writing. It's not an internet-only shorthand like tone indicators are.

I'm not saying this to discourage people from commenting. But I am trying to make a point about how avoidable the situation in the screenshot is. My friends and I see so many posts about these "odd letter things" on fanfiction and AO3 forums because authors don't understand what they had received. They opened up their comments and felt uneasy instead of excited. I've been there too, the person didn't even use a / in front of them.

have you gone outside lately?

kids run around in the street, they play kickball and baseball and they jump on their trampolines. they walk their dogs, they go to the park, they swim at the pool. high schoolers go out late with their friends and sit on the swings and talk about life, they go hiking and camping and they play sports. they tromp around in the woods looking for rocks and bugs. college ‘kids’ are collecting samples of dirty bay water and counting the fish species on the reefs and getting internships and doing every volunteer opportunity they can get their hands on. they’re fishing and running and biking and sitting on the ground counting ants. they’re taking long walks to nowhere, they’re sprawled out under trees listening to the cicadas yell while they knit or read or craft. they’re protesting and going to jail and even dying for what they believe in.

Born to late to for digital tech to be incomprehensible magic.

"Gen Z doesn't do any activism"

And that

"Lip service on Social Media doesn't count"

This has pissed me off for multiple reasons and I would like to have a little evidence to help change her mind.

Please, if you, like me, are gen z, please fill out the following:

I've never touched the land that they held so dear, or saw the views which took their breath away.

My grandmother used to say she'd bring me home one day, but which home? And is she home now, at peace with the man she loved and the man who loved her?

I feel the sands in my veins and the spices in my words,

Yet I see the rains on the moors, and hear the chanting of a language that's dying.