There's a "Reply-Guy cycle" I've observed, where you can tell that one of your Reply-Guys is starting to hate you. His replies will become increasingly snarky and negative, and eventually he'll start denouncing you via quote-tweet and talking shit about you behind your back...

The smart thing to do is to block this Reply-Guy early. But since you've had positive interactions with him in the past, you often make the mistake of trying to engage with him more, which makes him more fixated on you.

If you let this go on too long, he'll become fixated on you. Then when you finally do block him, he won't just forget you and move on. He'll follow you from an alt, and screenshot you, and periodically denounce you.

I have at least 2 guys who are STILL doing this, YEARS later.

The key here is that the Reply-Guy relationship is fundamentally about status anxiety. The Toxic Reply-Guy feels that his opinions deserve to be heard as much as yours. Initially, your responses to him make him think that he's finally getting heard -- finally on an equal plane.

But then when he decides you're Not That Smart and he starts yelling at you and you start to ignore him, it leads to frustration, because he had become used to being engaged on a plane of equality. And he *still* doesn't have as many followers as you. So he just gets angrier.

Eventually he fixates on you, decides you're The Biggest Idiot on the Internet, and trolls you til you block him. But your existence lingers like a wound in his mind, reminding him that The Biggest Idiot on the Internet still has a larger following than he does. So he stays mad.

The key culprit here is follower count. Follower count depends a lot on how many years of your life you've wasted posting stuff on this platform. So it can take years to catch up with someone you disagree with.. And during those years, the resentment just builds and builds.

All of social media is "Status As A Service", as Eugene Wei famously observed:
https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service

But since Twitter is primarily a platform for arguing rather than showing off or making friends or collaborating, it's something even worse. It's Status Anxiety As A Service.

The right-wing writer William F. Buckley once said that his main motivation was "the fear that the enemy will write more than I do".

Twitter took this fear and turned it into a wildly successful business model.

This isn't the only reason Twitter is a Hate Machine, but it's one of them.

(end)