You don’t have to engage with people on the Internet

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This is a lesson that was very hard for me to learn and I feel I should share
this here for everyone to take a moment and consider. You don’t have to engage
with people on the internet. You don’t need to hop into the comments section.
You don’t need to reply to that email.

You can just sit back and let people be wrong. Especially when it’s about your
employer.

Chances are, if you are reading this article you are on a development team or
are in some position where you are not one of the primary spokespeople for your
employer. You don’t need to engage with the discourse if you don’t want to. You
don’t need to reply to those comments. You can avoid it.

Sometimes people will engage in performative angst in comments about companies
as a way to signal they are part of the “in-crowd” that totally hates everything
corporations have “ruined”. These views are not representative of the larger
world. It is just them trying to get upvoted because they care about the
internet point number.

You really don’t have to engage with such things. Even if you are a formal
spokesperson for a company, you don’t have to engage. Engaging can make people
feel validated in their feelings and can sometimes make problems a lot worse
than if you just said nothing.

This has been a hard lesson for me to accept because in the moment it feels so
right to want to correct some person based on your lived experience. Those
other people are coming from their lived experience and as such given the same
inputs there will be drastically different outputs.

You don’t have to engage with people on the internet. It’s okay to let people be
wrong. It’s not worth the psychic damage.

This article was posted on M01 18 2023. Facts and circumstances may have changed since publication Please contact me before jumping to conclusions if something seems wrong or unclear.

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