Can You Hum It?

I Hate The Way We Talk Online — Jason Toney

Jason Toney asked a simple question on Threads: without googling, do you know the top songs in your favorite genre right now? Could you hum one? No agenda, no side to pick. What he got back was defensiveness, conspiracy theories about the charts, and people bragging about how far their taste sits from anything popular. The post widens from there into "main character" mentality and algorithm-speak, and ends with a plea I'll happily co-sign: "Have something real to say? Write a blog."

Rudeness online is nothing new, but nobody in those replies seemed to consider that Toney was asking because he wanted to know. When winning is the goal, a sincere question is read as a setup, as bait, the first move in an argument nobody agreed to have.

I don't know what it costs a culture when asking becomes suspicious. But we're clearly running the experiment online.