It’s harder to de-escalate online. We’re cut off from physical cues—no shifting weight, no micro-expressions, no instinctive threat-assessment pinging in the hindbrain—so it’s easier to go too far, too fast. Shame lands softer on a screen; body language is gone; conversation flows weirdly. In person, I’ll ask a clarifying question before I swing the rhetorical hammer. Online, I’m already mid-monologue when I notice the crack in the wall. Walking away from an internet argument sounds easy—just hit the little `x`—but the other person can still take victory laps while you’re gone. In meatspace, if I leave the room, the goading stops because there’s no one left to goad. Online, the conflict sits there, glowing, every time I open the tab. The asynchronous tempo makes it worse. We can juggle three simultaneous threads without breaking a sweat, yet my hormones still need the same sluggish seconds to dump cortisol. Text is denser than speech—higher information per pixel—and the processing lag feels like its own kind of stress test. Mid-sentence adaptation is nearly impossible when your sentence ships the moment you hit “enter.” Even offline dogpiles take effort; there’s a boring little queue while everyone waits their turn to pounce. Online, it’s a stampede. Drop the topic in person and the group usually moves on. Drop it online and it’s preserved in amber, waiting for you. You have to stay away for days before the fire dies down. IRL? Ten to thirty minutes, tops. https://discord.com/channels/762838985072050198/785611491691855882/1370567840192659547 I think it's harder to de-escalate online b/c we're cut off from certain physical cues I mean emotionally [9:08 PM]Eleanor: like it's easier to go too far [9:09 PM]Eleanor: and I kinda think there's something in our hindbrains when you're in person, either a threat assessent thing or a status thing or I dunno something [9:09 PM]Eleanor: that functions differently when people are in person [9:09 PM]Eleanor: and I don't really understand the mechanism for it 9:12 PM]Cassander: shame + body language plus conversation flows differently [9:12 PM]Cassander: you ask more clarifying questions [9:12 PM]RobRoy, Willy Wonka of our times: Its harder to "walk away" from an internet argument [9:13 PM]RobRoy, Willy Wonka of our times: You can just stop responding [9:13 PM]RobRoy, Willy Wonka of our times: But the other person is free to take victory laps [9:13 PM]RobRoy, Willy Wonka of our times: In meatspace, if you leave the room the person your arguing with can't continue to goad you [9:13 PM]Eleanor: it's also the async nature of it... like, it's easier to have 3 simultaneous threads going online. but in person if I say we're dropping it, it's easier to like, not come back to it cuz nobody 🔵 or whatever [9:14 PM]Eleanor: and the information flows are faster and so harder to process which is I think its own kind of stress in a discussion [9:14 PM]Eleanor: because the information density is higher in text but it's still the same amount of time for your hormones to move around your body [9:15 PM]Eleanor: and it's harder to adapt mid-sentence online [9:15 PM]Eleanor: you don't get the reaction cues in the same places 9:17 PM]Eleanor: it's hard to even have it happen offline [9:17 PM]Eleanor: it's boring to wait your turn in an in person dogpile 😂 [9:18 PM]Eleanor: I should write an article about this the hard thing about hitting x vs just walking away IRL is that the awful will be waiting for you when you get back in a way that isn't true in hte same way thanoffline 2 PM]Eleanor: like, IRL, you can end the strife much more effectively. online you have to affirmatively skip over it, even tho it's right there. and you check back, and it's not gone yet [9:22 PM]Eleanor: you have to leave for a lot longer for it to die down [9:23 PM]Eleanor: IRL it's more like 10-30 minutes, online it feels like it's days for shit to blow over