You know, guys on social networks are really quite terrible. It never really occurred to me really how terrible they are due to the design choices that most social networks take.

You see, most of the time you need to opt in on seeing something posted by a particular person. If you haven’t explicitly followed or friended someone, their posts or comments aren’t going to appear in your feed, unless someone you do follow takes the time to share it. Also, most comments and reactions to a certain post are hidden due to design. If you want to see how people react to a tweet, you need to actively engage with that tweet and click on it to see replies. By design facebook hides a comment thread besides the last two or three if you’re friends with the original poster, and completely if it’s a share.

This means that if you’re actually going to see how the majority of people are reacting to a post on a social network you have to engage with it yourself by clicking into the comment thread. If you don’t take an interest in the comments, you’re not going to see it at all. And often, you don’t bother, because seriously, the comments are terrible.

I follow Laina Walker (overly attached girlfriend) and Kat Dennings on Instagram. They post some often interesting things, and in the case of celebrities it’s quite nifty to see that they are actually normal people doing normal things.

The thing about Instagram, however, that got me thinking about this enough to actually start typing, is that their design forces you to look at the comments as you scroll through their mobile app. If you are going to scroll through your feed you have to see the last five comments on each picture. And in the case of famous women, you are going to see how scummy a lot of males are when confronted by a mixture of a well known, attractive female, and relative anonymity.

Take for example, this comment on a picture Kat Dennings posted overnight of herself and Beth Behrs wearing winter coats (name not removed because creeper):

Not a sexy picture at all, but this person decides that due to relative anonymity he can be a total creeper. And this isn’t even the most overt creepering I’ve seen on a female celebrity’s pictures (it was just the first one I found today and the one that inspired me to write this post).

I guess it’s all just proof of Gabe’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory (a point that Gabe himself has proven time and again doesn’t actually require anonymity, but that’s another post). Give someone a way to talk to people they objectify and they will prove themselves to be creeps.