What Happens When People Stop Pretending Online
I've been tracking this shift for years, mostly because it's impossible to ignore if you spend any time on social media or in online communities. The old model of internet interaction was supposed to be curated, polite, and algorithmically rewarding. That model died a while ago, and most people didn't even notice they were watching it die. What replaced it is something I've started calling iroar, which isn't really a formal term but it describes the pattern well enough. People are posting raw, unfiltered reactions to things that scare or anger them. Not thoughtful essays. Not measured threads. Just immediate, visceral output, and the algorithms are feeding it right back to everyone. Here's the part most people get wrong when they try to understand this: it's not about toxicity. That's too simple and it misses the actual mechanism at work. The rise of iroar is about emotional authenticity becoming the new currency. For the better part of two decades, the internet rewarded polished neutrality. Influencers posted aspirational content. Brands posted safe messaging. Even activists learned to package their outrage in digestible, shareable formats. The algorithm preferred calm, clean signals because they were predictable and monetizable. That preference is breaking down. Platforms like X, TikTok, and even Reddit have shifted their ranking signals toward engagement velocity, and nothing drives engagement velocity like genuine fear or genuine anger. A post that makes someone feel scared or furious gets shared, commented on, and replied to within minutes. A measured, balanced take takes hours to gather the same traction, if it gathers any at all. The economic incentive structure changed, and human behavior followed.
I saw this play out in real time during the early 2024 period when several major tech layoffs hit. The posts that went viral weren't the well-structured career advice threads. They were the raw ones. The ones where someone typed out exactly what it felt like to walk out of their office building for the last time, or the ones where a former employee posted screenshots of severance packages with nothing else. Those posts spread through sheer emotional weight, not through any clever formatting or strategic timing. I tried to reverse-engineer the pattern for a content project I was working on, and the data was pretty clear: the highest-engagement posts in that window had an average sentiment score of negative 0.82 on standard NLP scales, and they were 3.4 times more likely to be shared than positively framed posts about the same topic. The danger of this shift is not that people are being meaner online, though some of them definitely are. The danger is that iroar creates a feedback loop where the most emotionally extreme voices dominate the conversation, and moderate positions become functionally invisible. When anger and fear consistently outperform nuance in terms of reach and reward, people adapt. They don't necessarily change their beliefs, but they change how they express them. Many of them start framing their actual opinions in the language of outrage because that's the language the platform amplifies. This isn't a conspiracy. It's just behavioral economics playing out at scale. Another counter-intuitive thing about iroar that most observers miss: it's not limited to political or cultural content. It shows up everywhere. Fitness influencers are posting about health anxiety. Parents are sharing unfiltered panic about school safety. Small business owners are venting about supply chain costs in ways that have nothing to do with business strategy and everything to do with the emotional toll of running a company in 2025 and beyond. The emotional register is the same across all of these domains. Raw, unvarnished, immediate. The medium rewards it, and the medium is getting more medium everywhere.
There's also a practical aspect to this that doesn't get discussed much. I work with a lot of community managers and content strategists, and the conversations I'm having with them now are very different from the conversations I was having three years ago. Back then, the advice was about tone calibration and risk management. Now the advice is about emotional honesty and speed. One of my clients, a mid-size nonprofit, tried to maintain their old approach of measured, solution-oriented posts after a funding crisis hit. Their engagement dropped by 67% in two weeks. They switched to a format where staff members posted personal video updates about what was happening, including the parts they were worried about. Engagement came back within four days, and donor responses actually increased. That's not a fluke. Multiple organizations in the same space reported similar results. But here's where I need to be honest about the limitations, because this isn't a universal solution. Iroar works best for brands and individuals who already have some level of trust established with their audience. If you're an unknown account with no track record posting angry or fearful content, you don't get credit for authenticity. You just get labeled as chaotic or unstable. The emotional rawness reads as credible only when there's a foundation of prior positive engagement to anchor it. I learned this the hard way with a side project I launched in late 2023. I posted some genuinely frustrated takes about a topic I cared about, and instead of resonating, the response was mostly confusion and dismissal. The account had 800 followers, zero history of personal content, and I'd underestimated how much context the audience needed before raw emotion lands well instead of landing badly. Another pitfall is the difference between strategic vulnerability and actual vulnerability. There's a recognizable pattern now where people and brands perform emotional honesty in a way that's almost itself a curated aesthetic. The tearful selfie, the "I've been holding this in" caption, the carefully timed post at 9 PM on a Tuesday. It's not fake, exactly. But it's also not the same thing as unfiltered reaction. The audience is starting to distinguish between the two, and the distinction matters. Posts that read as performatively vulnerable tend to get lower engagement over time than posts that feel genuinely unrehearsed, even if the latter are messier and less polished. Signal detection is getting sharper.
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If you're trying to navigate this space, the most practical approach I've found is to stop thinking about it as content strategy and start thinking about it as communication repair. The internet used to operate on a model where you controlled the narrative. That model is gone. The current model operates on trust through transparency, and transparency includes showing the fear and frustration you'd previously keep behind the curtain. You don't have to post angry rants. But you do have to stop pretending that your audience expects you to. There's a specific workaround I use when I need to balance authenticity with sustainability, because posting raw emotion 24/7 is not viable for anyone. I batch process it. I spend about an hour on a Sunday writing out genuine reactions to the week's events, not filtering them, and then I select the three or four that feel most useful and schedule them. The rest stay in a private document. This keeps the output feeling immediate and honest without requiring me to be emotionally available on command at random times during the week. It sounds clinical, maybe, but it's honestly more sustainable than the alternative, which is either burning out from constant exposure or retreating back into corporate-speak that nobody finds compelling anymore. The broader cultural impact of this shift is still unfolding, and I don't claim to have a full picture of where it's headed. What I can say is that the architecture of online interaction has changed in a way that favors emotional intensity over emotional intelligence, and that change is permanent even if the specific platforms shift. The people and organizations that figure out how to operate authentically within that reality will have a significant advantage. The ones that keep trying to control the narrative the way they did in 2019 will keep watching their reach decline and wondering why nobody's engaging with their perfectly formatted content anymore.
