I guess maybe “The comments are a place to show how smart I am” is better than “The comments are a place to be an asshole,” but if so, it’s not much better.

Sometimes I think maybe it is even worse.

Either way, it is a gross and all-too-common pattern/behavior. Part of it is the result of social media platforms that incentivize attention-seeking over community, but I see it happening frequently enough on Mastodon to make me think that algorithms focused on driving engagement at all costs are not solely to blame.

In general, I feel like comments suck because of the scale of these platforms. Community management is both necessary and extraordinarily resource-intensive; building these tools that allows (and encourage) everyone to talk to everyone else makes it basically impossible for interactions like comments to remain healthy.