There are so many ways to be on the internet now. You can meme, you can troll, you can influence, you can pour your heart out. You can inspire, you can aspire, you can post infographics directly into the void. You can overbuy, undersell, or stumble into a dancing TikTok cult. You can date, you can break up, you can do both within a few rows of an Instagram grid. You can slide into DMs, slide out of toxic relationships. You can lurk, or launch, or engage, or, with a heavy heart, announce. You can have an OnlyFans. You can be a trad wife. You can try Costco foods and scream about them at varying volumes with your family. You can sing, you can dance, you can go viral with an onomatopoeia. You can start a podcast and scam people with cryptocurrency. (You can also, alternatively, get scammed by a viral star’s cryptocurrency.)
There is nothing so niche, so unimaginable, so good or bad that you can’t do it on Beyoncé’s country internet in 2024. But the most enduring thing you can be on the internet—the thing that has withstood every technological advancement, every new wave of virality—is annoying. With each new year and each new online platform, we stray further from the light of the simpler, more anonymous internet we once knew: eBaum’s World, Club Penguin, Facebook before your aunt got on it, Old Gregg. Now, as technological advancement pushes the internet to grow and morph into something ever more Byzantine, there are so many more opportunities to be annoying.
Sometime around when every blog was being made into a book and Tumblr was shaping an entire (very horny) generation, we came up with a few behavioral checks and balances to guide our emerging online social lives. Facebook poking went with the tides as we began to understand the basics of social media and, along with it, an awareness that away messages and statuses might one day come back to haunt us so we should really cut that shit out. (But not fast enough! Jodi Walker IS getting Chipotle tonight hell yeah hell yeah hell yeah—March 2011.) Eventually, we came to understand that you shouldn’t use the Nashville filter on Instagram because it was too conspicuous to be taken seriously, but you should always use a filter. Those who struggled with boundaries in the real world also struggled with them online, learning that you really shouldn’t find people on OkCupid and then message them on other platforms because that’s unnerving …
Extremely Online A Celebration of Internet Ephemera
But now, people know your height, your age, your job, what your Goodreads reviews say about your social ideology, the shape of the metal pins in your spine and how they radicalized you against the American health-care system, that you like shirtless hikes and Starbucks … you know, all your basic dating app data. They know it before you even speak to them, really. A lot of strangers may just know that stuff about you because the internet is for public consumption now. Social media is no longer meant for your friends and family to see how and what you’re doing (Jodi Walker IS writing a blog tonight). It’s so much more than that. It’s where we buy and sell. Where we’re influenced and de-influenced (y’know, if those de-influencing videos make it into your TikTok algorithm). Where we network, where we market ourselves, even where we hide ourselves. You can opt out of social media to a certain degree, but if you don’t, the internet can’t opt out of you.
And with great scrolling comes the great responsibility to not accidentally do the most annoying thing possible at every turn. With so many new ways to use the internet, it feels like it’s time to reestablish some decorum—the kind we use in public. For example, in August of this year (almost 14 years after Instagram launched in October 2010—when this author thought it was merely a photo editing app on which to post nonstop pictures of deeply mediocre at-home manicures—and seven years after Instagram introduced the carousel post), the platform increased its photo limit on one post from 10 photos to 20 photos. Which, I’m here to tell you, is chaos. It’s lawless. It’s how Jennifer Lopez publicly bounced back from a shocking but not surprising divorce announcement from Ben Affleck with 16 photos and the cryptic caption “Oh, it was a summer.” Technically, the 20-photo carousel should hearken back to the mundanity of 2010s Facebook. But Instagram didn’t give us more photo-posting rope with the benevolent hope that we might post 20 blurry photos of 20 different poses from one party like in the good old days. No. We can post 20 photos in one carousel now because the algorithm likes 20 photos. Because influencers and brands get more engagement with a carousel, and we get to feel like we offer more social value by posting more of our photos … when the real value is in looking at more of theirs. Maybe the 20-photo carousel feels like a millennial scrapbook when you use it—but J.Crew can’t sell a sweater to a scrapbook. It can—and will—sell it to the overthinking human behind the scrapbook because it’s trapped us all in the same place.
There’s no right way to use the internet, but increasingly, there are more wrong ways to use it. We need to reestablish some social structure for the latest online anarchy that we somewhat willingly and somewhat forcefully live under. We’ve cleaned up our Facebook albums from 2007 and even pretended to bring them back under better circumstances, but we still haven’t cleaned up some of our most humiliating online behaviors. I mean, Gen Z tried to bring Facebook poking back for goodness’ sake. Even the most socially liable among us will not fall for it this time, Zuckerberg!
Because we’ve got a new set of rules! And by investing in a few (dozen) newish internet commandments, you can give yourself a head start toward not being the last person still saying, “you win the internet today, good sir,” or holding a fish in your dating profile. You can carve out some karmic space for when you inevitably fall on the wrong side of an AI moral conundrum. And, sure, some people have yet to abide by the last set of rules, but it’s still important to know the etiquette if you’re going to defy it. At least then your 6-foot trout is subversive. So get your tablet-etching tools out: We’ve got a lot to cover from the past decade or so.
Thou shalt not put songs on Instagram posts.
I’m so sorry, I know this is going to hurt some feelings, but unfortunately, it’s the law. Rules are made for order that ultimately provides comfort, not the other way around. You may enjoy scrolling through all the most thematic songs that score your Italian getaway (it’s “That’s Amore”; you already know it is), but practically speaking, adding songs to Instagram hard posts is a nihilistic endeavor that benefits nothing and no one. It’s simply not worth it. Have you ever experienced a song in your Instagram feed and thought, “This guy really does have good taste in music; I should listen to Frank Sinatra more because he really nailed it with this selection of ‘New York, New York’ for his trip to New York City”?
At best, a song on an Instagram post is unaffecting. At worst, your viewer doesn’t realize you’ve chosen to add “Kokomo” to your beach vacation carousel, they swipe a little too aggressively, and boom—they’re serenading an entire conference room with the Beach Boys from under the table where their phone was hidden while a photo of you drinking out of a coconut looks up at them.
With Instagram posts, it really is prudent to apply the Coco Chanel rule of thumb: Look in the mirror and take one feature off before you hit send. And please do make sure that one thing removed is “Started From the Bottom” on a picture of you and your husband at a fraternity formal 12 years ago. That wasn’t the bottom, Stacy. You were living in an apartment with your three best friends. We had our little fun adding songs to stories—we really did! But the internet is so bombarded with sound everywhere else already, maybe we just keep the grid to being a visual medium? And speaking of sound pollution …
Thou shalt not use 2x speed within earshot of another human.
You can listen to TikTok or a podcast at 2x speed if you must; I do not begrudge you your precious saved minutes (although the idea of anyone listening to my voice at double speed makes me want to swallow a sock and never talk again). But you cannot listen to sped-up audio aloud. A voice recapping how their ex-husband had a secret second family in 60 different parts at double speed may sound reasonable in the privacy of one’s own head, but when exposed to the public (which, in this specific instance, absolutely includes the spouse sitting 1 foot away from you on the couch), that sound is merely an aural fun-house reflection of humanity’s need to consume, and it’s terrifying enough to bring down this whole operation. If you want to keep doing the deranged thing, do it in between your own two ears only.
Thou shalt cite thou’s sources when thou’s sources are TikTok.
I’ve done it—I’m not saying I haven’t done it.
But we simply cannot say that we “read something somewhere,” or even that we “heard something” about a story, if the source in question is TikTok. There is plenty to be learned on TikTok, totally. But you also have to take it with the grains of salt they scatter on the roads in winter, and other people need to know they should be doing the same with what you’re telling them. We can learn about medical conditions and social justice and politics on TikTok … but we can also learn how to make macaroni and cheese with pennies, so it really is just a “more information is better” sort of situation.
Thou shalt not publish personal essays on The Cut.
And yet, sometimes less is more! Just because The Cut will pay you good money to write an essay doesn’t mean you should. And this isn’t even a rule I want people to obey; it’s just advice I should technically offer if we’re attempting to make the internet a more socially savvy place. If you pitch a personal essay to The Cut and they’re like, “That sounds like a great fit; we’d love to run it,” you should run your ass in the other direction. You have done something shockingly dumb. People will make fun of you. All feelings are valid, except for this very specific one of yours—the one that said, “I know I’m a financial journalist who was duped by an extremely obvious financial scam that almost no one else would fall for, but I have to let the people know about what happened to me because I am a victim.” That feeling is understandable but objectively wrong—best to avoid. (Again, best for you, not for me.)
Thou shalt not divulge one’s height with anything more than numbers.
The discussion around height and how it inordinately affects online dating is nothing new. Fudging the numbers of one’s height on dating apps is already a well-established and often-disregarded social faux pas. But at this point in the life of the internet, it’s time to stop passing the buck on why you’re offering the information at all. If you’re brave enough to not subscribe to the social norm, do it. Let people think you’re one of the bad heights! Don’t hit us with the “6’2 because apparently it matters.” Oh, man—if you’re 6-foot-2, I know that it matters just as much to you as it does to anyone else. Don’t make me feel like it’s my fault that I’m being told your height by you. You don’t know what I want! Maybe I want to pick you up, hands-to-feet, and shake you like a snow globe. “Because apparently it matters.” Everything MATTERS, Brian! What you like, what you hate, which class you were in when you found out about 9/11, whether you meal prep, whether you wake up at the same time every day …
If you don’t like the system, don’t conform to it. And if you have no intention of wearing heels, please don’t suggest that you would do so in your height description, because I’ve got a nice-sized foot, and I’ll put you in one. Let’s save all that winning witticism for the cursed texting stage instead.
Thou shalt not complain about recipe websites.
You guys, we’re actually all good on this one. There’s no need to complain anymore, let’s wrap it up. No one reads the story about the author’s special connection to Meyer lemons ahead of the recipe, and we all know that no one reads the story before the recipe. But the great part is that literally no one is asking you to, so there’s no need to complain about it! There’s almost always a button at the top of the website that takes you straight down to the recipe, and it’s been embedded by the very same author who wrote the thing you don’t want to read up top. How nice! Hardworking recipe writers simply do this because the intro creates the SEO that has landed you on their recipe in the first place.
Hit the button, make the garlicky, lemony, leeky, jammy egg, and move on without comment! Speaking of comments though …
Thou shalt keep thou’s recipe substitutions to oneself.
Let me tell you what we are not doing on the internet anymore: commenting on recipes to ask if you can leave the beans out of the Beany Bean Soup Several Bean Ways or to brag about all the ways that you completely changed the integrity of the recipe …
If you are allergic to eggs, please do not try to make the egg soufflé work with your own substitution and then comment that this recipe is just not good. If you replaced the parsley on the egg soufflé with mint—OK, disgusting, and other people will not benefit from you telling them that. If you like to sprinkle nails into most of your dishes because you enjoy the tangy taste of blood, that is your prerogative. But keep it out of the comments of a professional recipe! Not in 2024. Not anymore, nuh uh. The NYT Cooking chaos ends now.
Thou shalt offer a little insight, as a treat.
No one cares if you overshare on the internet anymore, but they do care if you under-share after oversharing. If I watched you fawn over a partner for years and liked every significant-other appreciation post out of the goodness of my heart and read countless captions about “vacations with this beautiful creature” and “Sundays with him” and then him disappears, I just think I deserve a little explanation! I put in the work. I studied the tape. I was told repeatedly this was your forever plus-one, and now you’re at a wedding without Dorinda, and also she’s been deleted from your grid without explanation? Give me something—anything! I deserve it after all those Sundays with him.
Thou shalt not fall victim to gift guides for dads.
There is an art to writing gift guides. It is an art that finds a muse in women, children, pets, mothers, grandmothers, teachers, neighbors, and loose acquaintances. But gift guides for men really do seem to be the final boss in the division of gender. Though no one entirely knows why, gifts for men simply cannot be guided by the internet or its curators. Maybe it’s because men are not a monolith. Yet every year, when the holidays roll around, almost every gift guide is like, “What about a knife with a blade made out of repurposed shotgun shell casings and a bourbon-infused handle with a bespoke vial of beard oil inside? It’s also a wallet!” If you’re attempting to identify a holiday gift for a man in your life via an internet guide, you better hope that that man is a wallet-less beard-haver … which is why we are not doing that anymore. Just buckle down and figure it out yourself. I promise you: Your dad doesn’t want whiskey rocks. He may love whiskey, and he may love you, but he just will not use those damn rocks. Because they’re not real, and they’ve never been real. No one has ever wanted to drink a drink with rocks in it, not even your bearded, wallet-less dad.
Thou shalt not complain about dating apps on dating apps.
No one’s making you do this! You can go loiter around the produce aisle and see if you can kick up some conversations about how to tell which watermelon is juiciest. (Here, I’ll get you started: It’s the size-to-weight ratio!) Unfortunately, you have chosen—yes, chosen!—to be on at least one dating app, so to act above it is a little demeaning and disheartening to the other people who are there. And, yeah, everyone is having a bad time. It’s difficult to date on the internet. But you’re not above it; you’re part of it, and you’re making it even harder on yourself. You’ve just gotta lean in or take yourself somewhere else to find love. Oh no, but I didn’t mean that, anything but tha—
Thou shalt not use LinkedIn as a dating app.
Can’t we just have one sacred thing? One social media platform with some rules and regulations because it is, by design, supposed to be a professional networking platform?
The answer is a resounding no, obviously. LinkedIn might be the worst offender of people misbehaving precisely because it is a place that ostensibly demands both social and professional decorum. And apparently, in more recent years, not only has LinkedIn become a depository for collective egos the likes of which you rarely see outside of a Cybertruck-and-Patagonia-vest-combo sales event, but alleged professionals have also just shrugged their shoulders and started using LinkedIn as a dating app because you can filter potential matches for their degrees, location, job title, and financial success. Y’know … from their job profiles … on the social media platform for getting jobs. (Situationship is not a job. It’s barely a portmanteau!) It’s definitely possible to slide into someone’s DMs on LinkedIn without being creepy. Maybe they’re a former classmate and you have no other way to contact them—but just imagine they were jobless and how excited they would be to hear from a former classmate out of the blue in a professional capacity, only to find out that classmate wanted to share two glasses of house wine and a plate of calamari and then kiss instead of helping them get health insurance.
If it doesn’t stop, I’ll finally figure out how to endorse someone on LinkedIn—and then I’ll endorse every LinkedIn dater for being unprofessional in the internet workplace!
Thou shalt not write emails using ChatGPT.
Listen, we’re a little early on AI to make any hard-and-fast rules yet. It took seven years of IG carousels to be like, “You know what, guys, it’s a little too much.” But we’re dealing with robots here, so as a first line of defense, I think we can all agree that if you are capable of writing an email and are currently over the age of 24, there really is no reason to use a robot hive mind to write your out-of-office. You have a robot hive mind. No one is more equipped to write an email than this current generation of adults. We started this shit. We learned to type with Mavis Beacon. Remember when you first emailed a professor to ask for an extension on a paper? You can still do that. That’s in you. Don’t abandon it for an email that’ll strangely find a way to use the word “tapestry.”
Thou shalt not be a LinkedIn tease.
This is another one that I actually don’t want anyone to stop doing, but again, I am a benevolent internet overseer and so I have to tell you: It is very silly when you tease on LinkedIn—more than any other platform—that you have something special coming up and that we should “stay tuned” because you “can’t wait to share what’s next.”
It’s a social media website about jobs. And your job, Jacob, is being a tax attorney. What’s next is almost definitely not a pivot to Etsy basket weaving. What’s next is almost definitely more of being a tax attorney. And that really is wonderful because you’ll be doing your job that you’ve chosen! However, it’s pretty standard stuff vis-à-vis jobs, so it probably doesn’t need a PR rollout. Save that energy for tax season, I think.
Thou shalt not double-dip on grid posts and stories.
There’s a small amount of flexibility here, in that if it is really important (maybe you’re announcing an anaphylactic nut allergy, or, I don’t know, that you broke up with your forever plus-one), then a few duplicate posts are fine. But if you then post each and every one of your monthly photo dumps to your stories, I want to know: What are we really doing here? Did you get the guy, did you get the job, did your house get any bigger, did money get magically put into your account? If you’re an influencer—yeah, OK, maybe. But if you’re a lay-fluencer? Everyone just saw in two separate locations that you had one dirty martini, and they won’t be paying attention when it’s time to double-announce that nut allergy.
Thou shalt tread lightly on social media inception.
There is a thing that’s happening these days where people make whole podcasts out of reading Reddit posts … and then they put smaller clips of them reading the Reddit posts on their podcast … onto TikTok. That’s just one too many levels of internet inception to possibly still consider what you’re watching original content. Kill it with fire.
Thou shalt not chew directly to camera.
Some of these commandments may not affect every corner of society, but there is one blight currently consuming the entire internet: It’s suddenly not just fine, but expected, to eat on camera on social media. Like … all the time.
Now, I understand that recipe videos are bigger than ever, and believe me, my little lunches benefit greatly from them. But why does it have to involve so much actual eating—and so many sounds of eating—on camera? For decades, they’ve been starving Bachelor contestants into drunken rampages because it is universally understood that no one wants to see someone else eat on camera. And now society is clearly on the verge of collapse because it’s all anyone does on TikTok. Sometimes it’s not even cooking videos, just someone who wants to multitask while telling an interesting story. But we have to draw the line somewhere, and I firmly believe that line is seeing the actual … chewing. And, yes, this rule applies to the little move where someone takes a huge bite of something and then puts their hand in front of their mouth and raises their eyebrows and nods vigorously throughout the entire chewing process to let you know it’s good without talking because they can’t talk because their mouth is full of food.
We still know what you’re doing back there! STOP IT, PLEASE! Just cut the camera! We trust that you tasted your food and it was good because you are a good cook! WE TRUST YOU WITHOUT ALL THE CHEWING!!! Please stop!
Thou shalt not repost someone’s entire Instagram story.
I’ll just say it: This is for the husbands. Heterosexual husbands do this exclusively. So gentlemen, let me hold your hand when I say this: We’ve seen all the Instagram stories that your wife posted from your vacation in Greece. They’re gorgeous. And she very sweetly tagged you in all of them, which is so nice! However, it is completely unnecessary for you to repost every single one of those stories without even adding a secondary caption (or, not for nothing, saying thank you for the posts and tags).
Also, when you repost the stories, it zooms them out, which actually means you’re posting not only a completely plagiarized story but a much worse one.
Thou shalt let other people’s internet be their internet.
What if, in this new wave of the internet, we tried to check our ego at the door of other people’s social media, even though we really still want to be the center of attention? Yes, it is exciting that you knew your best friend was engaged before anyone else because you got the FaceTime on the night of while everyone else has to share this measly carousel of still photos. But do you have to comment, “Ahhhh, I’ve been waiting for this post,” just to assert your dominance? And I’m so sorry, but did the public declaration of congratulations get lost in the internet mail? On this new internet, we’re going to try to be a little less desperate by, ironically, being a little more focused on what we think about ourselves rather than what everyone watching thinks of us. And with that, the biggie …
Thou shalt post with confidence.
I recognize that after pummeling you with almost two dozen rules on how to behave on social media (as a favor!!! ahhh, I’ve been waiting for this post!!!) I may not have been instilling in you the greatest confidence to trust your instincts. But there are three things to remember: (1) None of us, not one, can escape being annoying on the internet; (2) almost all of what you shouldn’t do on the internet revolves around being as generous to other people as possible—and ideally that works in your direction as well; and (3) if you know what you shouldn't do, then what you should do actually becomes a lot more exciting.
A big part of the recent vibe shift in social media—from grid posts to stories; from tossing up a photo of what you were experiencing in the moment in 2014 to posting a photo dump of curated slides in 2024—seems to result from overthinking how what we post will make others think of us. So we put up 12 photos with a two-word caption, or a song lyric just vague enough to let it be what other people might want it to be. But other people don’t really want anything out of your content except to see you, to know you better. That part of the friends-and-family 2010s internet still remains, somewhere behind all the affiliate links. So put up a single photo of the fucking sunset or your mediocre manicure if you want to. Remember when you wanted to?
You actually are the all-knowing authority figure of your internet. If you want to post every single slide of your Spotify Wrapped, you just go ahead and do it. But lose the undermining “Well, I guess if everyone is” because, no, everyone is not! You’re doing it because you want to, and that’s fine! Maybe someone will be annoyed—but they’ll also know that you love Reneé Rapp now, and maybe that’s a worthy enough cause for you to be willfully annoying. That, in fact, is confidence. We’re just adapting to the world that we live in and attempting to create a little structure. And maybe, also, to post a good selfie, and make a good egg soufflé, and go on a date with a good person of indeterminate height … because apparently that matters.
