These days when I want to kill time, I check my LinkedIn feed. It’s not great but it’s better than Facebook. I just have to sift through the “ten habits of successful people” and “five reasons to quit your job” and “five life lessons from a celebrity” B.S. until I stumble upon something actually interesting and/or (mostly or) useful. In the process, I may “desperately” stop following or even remove connection with someone. To me, that someone’s social credit has run out.
By social credit I don’t mean the social credit philosophy or China’s new Orwellian Social Credit System. By the way, it’s a shame that we call the very system of government and the very society that George Orwell identified as destructive, Orwellian. It’s like honouring the discoverer of a disease by putting his name on the disease. If it were up to me, I would call true liberal democracies Orwellian, not police states.
I believe we all give others chance to express themselves or ideas and subjects dear to them. The more we enjoy hearing about one’s ideas and interests, the more time we are willing to spend absorbing them and the more we don’t enjoy one’s ideas and interest the less time we are willing to waste on them. This makes even more sense when we look at it in the context of a social media like LinkedIn or Facebook. Think of it as a bank where each of your “connections” has an account. Every time you see a post by (or because of) a person, if you like it, you add some amount to the account, i.e., credit, proportional to how much you liked it and if you hate it, you remove some amount from the account, i.e., debit, proportional to how much you hated it. There are (at least) two problems with such a system: (a) we are negatively biased, i.e., hatred trumps love (despite the popular belief), and (b) we are very bad at keeping track and aggregating experiences. As a result, it is not a very fair system. However, it is what it is and we are stuck with it.
To put it simply: if we don’t like posts by, or updates about, someone a sufficient number of times, our patience runs out and we ignore or block him. However, it also depends on how many times we have liked their posts. I think this has already happened to me on Facebook either decided by my “friends” or decided by Facebook for my friends (lack of quotes is not an accident), possibly because my passionately partisan and painfully pessimistic precarious political posts outnumbered my casual compulsive culinary comments and carelessly copy-pasted captions under cute cat cartoons; obviously the several hundred pictures of my dog didn’t help either. I suspect that there is no going back. Once you run out of credit in someone’s mental bank, you are dead to that person and sadly reincarnation doesn’t exist even in people’s imagination. Even if his feelings are changed, the medium doesn’t have any built in system of suggestions for unblocking you and giving you a chance. Contrast that with the real world where people get second and third chances all the time. If you haven’t experienced it you have never had a real friendship. Blocking and ignoring a person in the analogue world takes continuous effort and only very few commit to it 24/7.