Commenting on Social Media Has Become Cringe

Commenting on social media has become cringe. Not exactly unpopular or risky, just cringe, which is somehow worse. Cringe is the word people use for things they'd be embarrassed to be seen doing even if nobody could actually punish them for it.

At some point about a decade ago, the public comment started dying and the private message took over. If you had something to say about a post, you didn't say it under the post anymore. You hared it or screenshotted it and sent it to a friend with your actual reaction attached, the joke, the disagreement, the observation, and left the comment section itself for something safer, or for nothing at all. I did this too. I still do it. The DM became the place where people were honest and the comment section became the place where they performed.

That shift didn't happen by accident. Platforms grew, and once they grew, they needed a way to measure whether any of it was working, so they started counting. Likes, reach, follower counts, impressions. The moment expression becomes something with a number attached to it, it starts changing shape to get a better number. Comments stopped being reactions and started being auditions. Nobody wants to perform sincerity in a room where the audience is judging in public and the stakes of getting it wrong, a bad take, a joke that lands flat, a comment screenshotted out of context and reposted somewhere else entirely, are real. So people did what anyone does when a space stops feeling safe. They left, quietly, for somewhere smaller.

Scrolling and occasionally forwarding something to the three or four people closest to you is not really social in any meaningful sense of the word. It's closer to consumption with a delivery mechanism attached. The public square emptied out, and what's left behind still looks like a public square, the platforms haven't changed their interface, but almost nobody is actually standing in it saying anything.

This isn't only a loss for individuals. It's a loss companies caused for themselves without fully realising what they were giving up. There used to be something close to free market research sitting in every comment section: people telling a brand exactly what they thought, unprompted, in public, at no cost to anyone. You could post a photo of a new product and read, in the replies, precisely what was wrong with the price, the size, the colour, the whole idea, days before a focus group would have told you the same thing at ten times the cost. That feedback loop didn't need managing. It couldn't be bought, because it was already being given away.

Somewhere along the way, brands decided social media was a marketing channel instead of a listening one, and optimised accordingly. Content calendars replaced conversation. Reach and impressions became the metrics that mattered, which meant the account's job became broadcasting rather than receiving. Comment sections that used to carry real, if messy, feedback started filling with bots, complaint threads, and the kind of low-effort reaction that shows up whenever a channel becomes a target for engagement farming rather than a place anyone expects to be heard. Now the same companies pay agencies to go find out what people think, through surveys and focus groups and paid research, for information that used to arrive on its own, for free, if anyone had still been listening in the comments.

Cultural institutions aren't exempt from this. A museum posting an exhibition photo used to get the same kind of raw, unfiltered public reaction as any brand, what people actually felt walking through a space, phrased however they'd phrase it to a friend rather than however they'd phrase it in a formal survey response. That channel closed the same way it closed for everyone else, and what replaced it is usually a satisfaction survey handed out at the exit, which measures something, but not the same thing.

There's a real gap right now between what people actually want from digital spaces, to create something, to react honestly, to be part of a thing without performing or self-editing first, and what the current social norms actually allow. The formats haven't caught up. Comment sections are still built the way they were built when the number attached to them didn't matter yet, and nobody wants to be first back into a room that's already proven it can turn on you.

Even writing this feels a little cringe, if I'm honest, putting an opinion out in public where it can be judged and screenshotted along with everyone else's. But it shouldn't be cringe to participate in something you're genuinely excited about online. The problem was never that people stopped wanting to react. It's that the formats stopped being safe to react in. What's actually needed is something built for co-creation instead of consumption from the start, where the point isn't to perform for an audience or rack up a number, it's to add something of your own to what's already there. That's the exact question Texture Grid is trying to answer, one word and one texture grid at a time.