The Myth of the Persuadable Spectator, or: Why Most Internet Arguments Are a Waste of Time

...possibly including this one!

So you’re fifty comments deep in an argument with some dweeb who sweats spite and spits hatred. He’s insulting trans people, you’re defending them - and after a novel’s worth of words, it’s clear that a) neither of you will stop responding to each other, and b) neither of you will convince the other of a goddamn thing.

Still, you think: I need to keep engaging with this schmuck, because Other People are watching me debate and being convinced!

Set the keyboard down, comment-jockey. You’re wasting your time. And your time is important.

Me, I think the biggest challenge to leftists these days is figuring out where to invest their time and energy - because there’s so much propaganda out there designed to bog us down in useless debates that make us feel better, but don’t actually accomplish anything.

Put another way:

I think a very real reason we keep losing elections is that we’re focusing our efforts on persuading imaginary people instead of supporting and energizing actual people on our side.

And I think the most successful propaganda that leftists have fallen hook, line, and sinker for is the Myth of the Persuadable Spectator - that spending hours engaged with this Facebook troll is worthwhile simply because someone else is reading this thread and being convinced!

Like all good propaganda, there’s a speck of truth nested the center of this dubious claim: there was an abundance of persuadable spectators, back when the internet was smaller.

But these days? Ain’t nobody there.* Let me tell you why.

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Speaking of futile efforts to persuade people, I have a new book series out! Statistically speaking, you, dear reader, have probably bought it by now! Can I then persuade you to talk it up to your friends so I can sell more copies?

Probably not. But it’s a good series, people seem to like it, and if the tagline “The Tiger King but with sympathetic characters and smuggled adorable baby dragons instead of smuggled abused tigers” doesn’t do it for you, well, I’ll put the pen down and stop wasting your time.

But look at that cover!

I spent too much commissioning this cover. I regret nothing.

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So before I break down this myth, let’s discuss the difference between commenting and posting in terms of “How likely are you to persuade someone who reads this?” (Which isn’t the only reason to post, of course, but it is the Persuadable Spectator justification for the battling it out on the Internet.)

Posting: Worthwhile! Keep doing it!

If you’ve created a post/video/Tweet/et al, that’s going out to people who follow you on social media - or to people who read the forum/Discord/etc that you’ve posted in - then, you’re speaking directly to people who, for whatever reason, have signed on to hear what you have to say. And sure, maybe you’re posting to an echo chamber of all lefties, or the algorithm doesn’t show that post to two-thirds of your audience…

But you have at least a chance to make your case… Or to make your trans/minority/queer/etc friends feel like you support them, which can also be well worth the effort.

And in most cases, the effort you put in is directly attributable to the engagement you get. If you spend thirty seconds tossing off a pithy bon mot like “Elon Musk drove Twitter into the ground and is now driving America into the ground,” welp, it’s unlikely to convince anyone who’s not already singing in your choir - but it took you under a minute, so little harm done.

Whereas if you write, say, a 2,500-word essay about The Myth of the Persuadable Spectator, sure, that’s an hour down the drain - but the people who get all the way to the end of your essay will have a greater chance of being persuaded.

Either way, good job! Have a cookie.

(Just be warned that if you’re hate-quoting someone, you’re giving them a platform to persuade your audience. If you’re quote-Skeeting some KKK member masquerading as a reasonable person, there’s the danger that someone who’s reading you goes, “Oh, that’s a good point.” So beware who you’re handing over to your friends and chosen family!)

Commenting Early On: Maybe worthwhile!

So there’s two ways to comment semi-productively:

• Be one of the first twenty replies to the post

• Respond to the first- or second-level replies to the post.

And here’s where the myth of the persuadable spectator starts to fall apart. Because in the modern Internet, nobody is reading past the first twenty replies unless they’re already deeply invested.

If you’re lucky, most people will skim the first ten replies to find the funny comments that got upvoted the most. After that, it’s like the second page of Google results - nobody’s going there unless they absolutely have to.

Truth is, by the time you’re leaving reply #300, the only people who will go to the effort to read it are the people who are looking for a fight.

And those people have made up their minds already. In many cases, they’re searching hungrily for keywords/hash tags so they can go ham on biscuits on the folks who dared criticize their precious Elon.

(Or so they’re searching so they can get their salary in rubles. Don’t forget, there’s full-time operatives out there who are paid to demoralize and exhaust you! Don’t kid yourself; you’ve argued with at least one bot or a paid operator, probably several.)

And maybe you’ll get some engagement in those replies! But nobody persuadable is showing up; what’s happening is that the algorithm is broadcasting your replies to your friends, and it’s broadcasting the other guy’s replies to their friends - and it’s not so much “an exchange of ideas” as “Two gangs banging garbage can lids to tell everyone to come to the alley fight.”

And let’s be honest: when the algorithm shows you a wall of comments from your buddy engaged in a furious argument that you utterly do not care about (“HONEY BAKED HAM ISN’T HAM, FELICIA!!!”), do you:

a) Go listen to your friend’s fine points about the substandard quality of Honey Baked Ham in the hopes of being enlightened, or:

b) Go “Crap, they’re going off about Honey Baked Ham again, scroll past, scroll past, scroll past.”

You know it’s b.

Fun fact: The only reason I pay attention to HBH is because my doctor invariably says, “You want your prescription sent to that drug store? Ooh, it’s across from the Honey Baked Ham!”

Likewise, by the time you’re three levels or deeper into a thread, the same principles apply. Nobody is reading through a complex seventy-post back-and-forth unless they came in packing an opinion anyway.

So if you’re making a point early on where people can see it without clicking deeper, great! Get in there!

But if not, at best you’re flinging a comment into the void. At worst, you’re hauling your own audience of flying monkeys in to have an argument as ritualized as Kabuki theater.

A Side Note For The Naive

There are many people who claim to be “apolitical.” They’re “Just asking questions.” They claim they want to understand.

But when you pay attention to their post history, you’ll find they’re asking the same questions over and over again, no matter how many well thought out and well-researched answers they get. (Call it “Rogan syndrome.”) You’ll find that they’re “apolitical,” but miraculously despite not claiming to be conservative, about 80% of their arguments neatly into party lines.

These folks prey on your desperate need to believe in the Myth of the Persuadable Bystander… but they’re not persuadable. They just don’t like the social backlash that comes from identifying as a TERF or a neocon or whatever ideology they’ve aligned with.

…which is not to say there’s not people with educatable moments! Your Aunt Louise may well not be familiar with queer culture - and may have some questions that seem awkward. If you have the spoons, it can be worth giving them some compassion to get past that ignorant phase that we all had at some point.

(Hint: Telling someone to “Just Google it” these days often sends them straight to Joe Rogan, one of the most popular podcasters on the planet. You cannot trust Google to educate any more, if you ever could.)

But if you give Aunt Louise good answers and she’s not internalizing any of them, or even acknowledging that those points have been made in her future posts, she is not persuadable. Move on, friend.

Commenting Later On, On Your Own Posts: Oh My God, Please Stop

So there’s two main arguments for getting into lengthy arguments on your own posts:

1. I’m persuading bystanders!

2. I’m letting the people I’m advocating for know I have their backs!

This is from an essay of mine. An embarrassing percentage of these comments are me.

I’ve already talked about why #1 isn’t really working - if someone wakes up to see Ferrett S has left 80 comments on this essay, they’re usually scrolling past quick as a subway train.

But the other argument - “Arguing back lets my minority friends know I’m advocating for them!” - is also booshwah. You know what will usually make your minority friends feel even better?

Feeling like they can comment on your posts without some spiteful bigot blasting them in the face.

Look, letting some jamook leave a wall full of transphobic comments in your space is just giving that bigot air to breathe - and it’s not like your minority friends haven’t inhaled that halitosis before. Like I said, the arguments for pro- and con- anything have all been regurgitated ad infinitum; there is not one trans person on the Internet who doesn’t know intimately what the TERFs’ most popular arguments are.

You let enough TERFs into your bar, it becomes a TERF bar. So why engage them? Block those mofos and move on. They’ve got their own space, you do not need to give them yours.

Commenting Later On, On Someone Else’s Posts: Oh My God, Please Stop

You know what I loved about determined conservatives engaged in slap-fights in my comments?

They brought me so much traffic.

Seriously, every time someone got a wasp up their ass about something I wrote and would not stop commenting, they usually brought on about five new people who were supportive. Mind you, I wasn’t convincing anyone, but I was getting people to broadcast my message further.

Social media profits off of engagement - they do not care what that engagement looks like. If people leave 50 excoriating comments on some dork essay, the algorithm goes “This is popular! I must show it to more people!” And then it starts going viral.

This is where “Just ignore the trolls” comes in - if all you’re doing is participating in a hate circle jerk where nobody is convincing anyone but you’re raising awareness of a hateful essay, you are doing active harm.

Look. The only way we’re gonna survive the next few years is to know what fights are worth having. And pouring your energy into giving some loathsome creep an extra thousand views is not The Way, my friend.

So What Do I Do?

• Block people in your own comments when it’s clear they’re not persuadable.

• Stop commenting in places that funnel traffic to jerks.

Or recognize your need to refute bozos for what it is: A fun way to pass the time. Engaging in flame wars can be entertaining! It’s often cathartic to unload your keyboard shotgun on some anonymous dorkola!

But treat it like a videogame: this is not productive, this is something you do for fun. As such, only flame if it invigorates you - once the debate starts to drain you, the opposition is winning.

What Was That Asterix (*) For?

When I say “Nobody does this,” that is a shorthand for “So few people do it that it’s not worth going out of your way to cater to them.” I’m absolutely sure some person is itching to weigh in to say “Well, I was persuaded!” or “Well, I read every comment on a YouTube video!”

Look. I read the manuals for every power tool I buy, front to back. But I can acknowledge that doing so is a very rare activity - and as a percentage of users, I am in such a vanishingly rare minority that I am statistically irrelevant.

And the overall point of this essay is “As an advocate with limited energy, where is the best use of my time?” Yes. There’s probably a Persuadable Spectator out there - maybe it’s you, recently, not back in 2010 when I’ve acknowledged it was an actual thing.

But are there better ways to invest your energy?

God yes. So many ways. Like, you know, actually getting off the keyboard and into real-life volunteering if you can.

Message ends.