Sorry for jumping in on the chain at this post rather than earlier up btw. It's kind of funny, I was just writing a long response to this because I think there's a lot more that has gone into things developing this way than just illiteracy - after all, people have been misunderstanding each other on the internet from the very first day two strangers met on here, I'm sure of that. While writing that response I just got a pretty illustrative reason as to why I think people are so adverse to online discussions nowadays.
I got a notification on a post that I made dated October 20th, 2013, the post was expressing shock that Obama had been following Jhonen Vasquez, a creator I greatly respect but wouldn't typically consider to be in the realm of "acceptable for a presidental account to follow" (how things have changed :face_holding_back_tears:). The reply that this person decided to add described the violence they'd have liked to inflict (I assume on the former president and not on the creator of Invader Zim). Completely out of nowhere, just an insane thing to say to a stranger, right? And this one time isn't a big deal, I'm just going to roll my eyes and move on. But if that person had a moderate following and decided to reblog instead, then I'd be dealing with that kind of nonsense for quite a while afterwards. it isn't hard for me to see how people get worn down and have a reluctance to respond when that's definitely not an uncommon experience at all. Anytime someone chooses to respond to posts, they're taking the chance that their own followers will be normal and that the person they're responding to will have normal followers too.
There's the issue of tone too - something that reads as sarcastic to one can be genuine to another. I was having a discussion with my friends in discord and thought I'd emphatically exaggerated a point, which didn't actually come across or wasn't interpreted correctly. A misunderstanding like that on public social media can honestly lead to a kind of social exile or targeted hate campaign. too many times have I been pulled into pro-anti-shipper (as used by socmed. fandoms) discourse despite believing that every issue around that sort of thing requires more nuance than either side will ever offer fourth. It's exhausting to get pulled into that, so while I personally want to have discussions on my fandoms so so badly, when I make a post and see a reply, there's a moment of reluctance to actually read it.
More than a lack of reading comprehension, I think a large majority of internet users have forgotten how to be.. understanding? have grace? with each other - so even a small mistake can be twisted into something major. Who would want to engage in conditions like that, when an imprecise turn-of-phrase or typo could lead to that? How can someone assume good intentions on the person responding or asking them to reflect when that assumption is so often taken advantage of by trolls? (Trolls doesn't feel like the right word here, I associate trolls with a kind of rage-bait performance art that is now only seen on the neopets newbies board and the notes of some funnymen, but I'm not sure of a good replacement?) I don't believe a lot of people want to be this way, but it's part of how social media feeds are set up to feed the beast - even tumblr has an algorithm now, so even if you don't take part in it and stay entirely on your main dashboard, others will and will react to the random posts they're given accordingly.
I think how the conversation is started also plays a role? There's someone I respect greatly on here, adore their posts, always very thought-provoking. But I'm very fond of tag-rambling since it used to be more common for tags to be seen as the domain of the reblogger (and their immediate followers), and not the domain of the whole of tumblr; the place to organize the post on your blog also became the place to organize your thoughts on the post. Because of this though, I've rambled in the tags of their post and, on occasion when I've been unlucky, they've at'd me in the replies to expand upon my tags, which has always caught me off-kilter because it reads as a violation of etiquette to me, even though I'm now severely questioning if that ever actually was etiquette rather than something I thought I had observed. This is usually only a problem to me because my tag rambles aren't usually.. coherent exactly, because I'm still not used to them being able to be seen so easily by everyone who isn't my immediate follower despite these updates having been in place for quite a while. My process of ruminating is very disjointed for a wide variety of reasons, so in cases like that, I don't feel prepared to have a discussion about something I didn't intend for others to see.
(And intention on social media and expectation of who sees what is another can of worms that I think also underlies all of this. It's kind of hard to adjust to the ways people have become more visible than ever before on these sites)
I hope that made sense? I used most of my personal experience as someone in the ages being discussed (26, I can't remember a time I wasn't on the internet, though I guess I'd say I really got in on it when I was nine or ten?) but I think there's so much more that goes into the state of internet communities now, so it kind of gets frustrating seeing the broader issue of discussions and sociability online get pigeon-holed into illiteracy. I didn't even touch on the things that I was going to bring up in my original response before getting that random reply.
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