Obviously a demon thread is a lousy way to get work done, in the sense of “improving the world.” But surely people get into these things largely for entertainment value?
When I see a big clusterfuck of a demon thread, my emotional response is “Yay! I can get lots of stimulation from this! People will talk to me!” They will not necessarily talk intelligently and neither will I, but talking will happen and continue vigorously for a while and that is super fun. There are lots of “hooks” for someone to speak. It’s wonderful in that sense.
The downside is that there’s so much conflict that someone’s likely to get hurt in earnest.
There are non-confrontational ways to get conversational stimulation, though. The “poll” or “ask meme” thread where you ask everyone to chime in with their personal experience or preference in response to a prompt is my favorite example. Personality typologies also work for this—“Which Hogwarts house are you” etc. The mood is friendly but the format has the same property—everyone has something to say and you can talk for ages. Prompts for people to talk about themselves can explode into huge multi-day threads just like demon threads do, but people are less likely to get hurt or regret the experience.
If you want to throw a big social media party and invite EVERYONE to chime in, might I suggest poll/opinion/personality-type threads?
When I see a big clusterfuck of a demon thread, my emotional response is “Yay! I can get lots of stimulation from this! People will talk to me!”
Huh, I thought I’d originally touched on this motivation (that I experience myself), but it looks like I ended up editing it out of the OP. (Although it looks like I ended up saying it in a comment to Ozy)
(I have some thoughts about when Demon Threads are the right tool for the job. I actually designed this post in a fashion intended to prompt a controlled, carefully summoned benign demon thread that would get engagement without [much] hurt feelings)
I do like your suggestions here of “when you just want the engagement and don’t have particular other goals in mind, here are social media party things you can do instead”.
Obviously a demon thread is a lousy way to get work done, in the sense of “improving the world.” But surely people get into these things largely for entertainment value?
When I see a big clusterfuck of a demon thread, my emotional response is “Yay! I can get lots of stimulation from this! People will talk to me!” They will not necessarily talk intelligently and neither will I, but talking will happen and continue vigorously for a while and that is super fun. There are lots of “hooks” for someone to speak. It’s wonderful in that sense.
The downside is that there’s so much conflict that someone’s likely to get hurt in earnest.
There are non-confrontational ways to get conversational stimulation, though. The “poll” or “ask meme” thread where you ask everyone to chime in with their personal experience or preference in response to a prompt is my favorite example. Personality typologies also work for this—“Which Hogwarts house are you” etc. The mood is friendly but the format has the same property—everyone has something to say and you can talk for ages. Prompts for people to talk about themselves can explode into huge multi-day threads just like demon threads do, but people are less likely to get hurt or regret the experience.
If you want to throw a big social media party and invite EVERYONE to chime in, might I suggest poll/opinion/personality-type threads?
Huh, I thought I’d originally touched on this motivation (that I experience myself), but it looks like I ended up editing it out of the OP. (Although it looks like I ended up saying it in a comment to Ozy)
(I have some thoughts about when Demon Threads are the right tool for the job. I actually designed this post in a fashion intended to prompt a controlled, carefully summoned benign demon thread that would get engagement without [much] hurt feelings)
I do like your suggestions here of “when you just want the engagement and don’t have particular other goals in mind, here are social media party things you can do instead”.