How not to be annoying online

(It's impossible.) On cringey couples, beauty TikTok/YouTube drama, and success on social media

A reader who’d prefer to remain anonymous recently wrote in and asked if I might be able to write something about “how not to be annoying as a couple online.” They added that they think Lynette and I do this well, which is very nice, though I can also guarantee we’ve got plenty of HATERS, because everyone with any sort of online platform, however small, has haters. That’s life on the internet, baby.

I will be using this question (thank you, Anon!) as an opportunity to pose (and sort of attempt to answer) a question of my own, one that’s concerned me to varying degrees of intensity for more than half my life: is it possible to not be annoying as a person online?

The short answer: No. Obviously. No matter what you do on the internet, someone is not gonna like your vibe. This is especially inevitable in a time when algorithms are pushing everyone’s personal content to far more eyeballs than ever before. I think all the time about how much more chaotic my very-online teenage life would have been if I had access to an app with billions of other people. I wrote more about that back in December, when I was mourning Twitter and hand-wringing about my belated arrival to TikTok.

When it comes to how Lynette and I present ourselves as a couple, I do think we could be way way way more annoying, which is really just another way of saying that we could be doing much more couple-specific content in general. If I made our relationship the main focus of my TikTok, for example, I can almost guarantee it would earn me many more followers, but that would also drastically increase our changes of posting cringe.