Before anything, I am going to say the rich irony of this post is that it's not directed at anybody in particular. I'm someone fortunate enough to not get vagueblogged or subtweeted about (or maybe I'm just totally oblivious to it), but I've seen it happen enough to friends and people online that I felt compelled to write a post about it.

Vagueblogging and subtweeting, I think, are the most toxic possible modes of online communication.

They enable societal norms of cynical, pessimistic paranoia and hypervigilance. People are required to be in the cultural know, not for enrichment or bonding, but to ensure they are "safe" and not targeted, or avoiding public-facing friendships with people who are. It normalizes snark, bullying, and passive aggressive behaviour.

But let's take a step back and actually define what these words mean.

Terminology and Origins: Vaguebooking

This phenomenon actually began on Facebook as "vaguebooking," as Dictionary.com's slang entry on it is defined as an intentionally vague but highly personal and emotional post designed to elicit concerned responses from friends and family, often viewed as a desperate bid for attention or validation.

Phil Reed, a psychology professor at Swansea University, writing for Psychology Today, connects vaguebooking to a real-world communication style researchers call "strategic ambiguity." This is what politicians use to say nothing in many words.

Vaguebookers often appear to be hoping to elicit emotional support or attention from others, and may have a hard time directly asking for help but want it offered to them, which Reed ties to insecure attachment styles.

Loneliness and histrionic personality traits have also been found to predict vaguebooking, per a study by Berryman, McHugh, Wisniewski, Ferguson, and Negy that Reed cites. On the environmental side, concerns about "digitally-mediated lurking," meaning unseen observers effectively watching without engaging, can drive people toward more vague posting as a form of self-protection, drawing on work by Child and Starcher. Vaguebooking is associated with poorer mental health, and high levels of it correlate with elevated suicidal ideation in younger people, citing Astleitner et al. and Berryman et al.

Where It Stands Today

Wikipedia's entry on vagueposting defines the act as posting without enough context for the post to make sense on its own, prompting others to ask what's going on. This is distinct from subtweeting, which is a vague post made specifically to call someone out while (and this is important) preserving plausible deniability.

A subtweet, at first glance, can look like an idle and harmless musing to someone that doesn't know any better. But when you begin writing longform vagueposts, the teeth start to show more prominently. The more specific the post in question, the more obvious the author is writing about a particular person without naming their name.

And, if there's enough controversy, there are other times where your entire timeline will be multiple people tweeting about the same thing without naming it directly. If you know, you know. You know? And this turns from a single person's discontent to a carefully calculated clique of gossip.

Jerk Magazine, in a piece titled "Passive Aggressive", writes how subtweeters vent aggression while avoiding direct confrontation, which frees them from accountability and sidesteps the need for mature conflict resolution. WiseSOVA describes the mechanics in "The Art and Harm of Subtweeting" as the vague hints that someone has wronged the poster, with the resulting mystery prompting everyone who sees it to scramble and figure out who's being talked about. You need to be within the in-group to even understand what's going on.

...And Yet It's Still Preferred

A 2016 Computers in Human Behavior study by Autumn Edwards and Christina Harris at Western Michigan University, covered by Dazed, had undergraduates rate direct versus indirect negative tweets.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, subtweeters were rated as less effective, less appropriate, and less socially competent than people who tweeted directly. The tweets were considered passive-aggressive, vague, attention-seeking, bitter, or anti-social.

But, interestingly, respondents still rated the indirect negative tweet more favourably than one that directly @-mentioned the target. People know subtweeting reads badly and still prefer it to direct confrontation.

Context Collapse

"Context collapse," coined by danah boyd and developed with Alice Marwick in their 2011 paper "I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately" is the challenge of delineating different audiences online, since the boundaries normally present in offline experience don't apply, and result in a bundling of audiences who would otherwise never share a room.

This is a reason why vagueblogging exists. When you can't address one person without everyone else overhearing, indirection becomes a (bad) workaround for a structural problem, not just a mere personality flaw.

Psychologist John Suler's "online disinhibition effect," from his 2004 paper in CyberPsychology & Behavior distinguishes toxic disinhibition like rude language, hostility, and other behaviour people wouldn't engage in face to face, from benign disinhibition, like increased self-disclosure. The screen itself always lowers the cost of the cruelty.

In Defense Of

Of course, not everyone agrees with the idea that vagueblogging is inherently wrong. I think it would be unfair of me to not bring up a counterargument to this. Disability/chronic-illness blogger Laina Eartharcher, writing under the name Who Loves Kitty, makes the case that vagueness is sometimes just privacy management, wanting to process something publicly without handing over every detail, rather than malicious manipulation. They write:

Sometimes you feel an overwhelming need to express your thoughts and feelings about something but can’t or don’t feel like sharing all the gory details with the world yet. Sometimes you feel compelled to say something about what happened, but don’t feel like seeing it in plain print yourself. Maybe you’re still in shock; maybe the reality is just too raw.

And continue:

Or maybe you feel strongly about something that happened, but it’s something you witnessed from the sidelines and thus, it’s not your problem directly, but you still feel compelled to say something, even if it’s just to offer up a commentary or position statement, without getting involved or feeling like you’re butting in, trying not to get the muck on you. Or maybe you’re friends with one or both parties involved in a conflict and you want to protect their identities, in hopes of allowing them to move on and heal. Maybe someone you care about got hurt by someone who ultimately revealed themselves to be a cruel or manipulative bully, and you don’t want to name names, for fear of drawing their ire and becoming a target yourself.

I can certainly sympathize with this. Sometimes, people care deeply and don't have the luxury to go all-out vocally with that care. Vagueposting is, then, a middle ground between staying silent or taking a huge risk with regard to the consequences of direct confrontation.

Doing anything publicly, especially online, comes with risk. And those risks are often totally disproportionate. I know for women especially, the potential for threats and harassment for holding any particular opinion or speaking up on any particular topic is there.

But I do not think taking this middle-ground between staying silent and being directly vocal is the answer. Sure, it allows the writer to say something while protecting themselves and lowering the risk towards them, but it still is contributing to this hostile, in-vs.-out, clique-like culture of non-confrontation that will always eventually bleed towards snark, resentment, and passive-aggressive nature.

A Better Ending

What we need to be doing instead is cultivating spaces online where people feel safer, and are safer. People with more privilege and lower risk—such as myself—need to be vocal and direct. As I said at the beginning of this post, I am not subject to vagueblogging or subtweets. People like me need to stand up for people who have been doing this on their own for way too long.

For community leaders, I implore you to write this out into your norms, explicitly. Conflicts get raised directly with the person or through a named mediator, not subtweeted at the group. Name behaviour, not people, when you're speaking from outside a conflict.

None of this resolves the original problem, that confrontation is still expensive and risky, and not everyone can afford it. But the people who can afford it have been hiding behind the same hedge as everyone else for too long. Spend the safety. That's what it's for.