We Don't Watch Things Anymore — We Watch Ourselves React to Them

There was a time — and it wasn't long ago — when the comments section was the thing you scrolled past with a shudder. "Never read the comments" was internet gospel, right up there with "don't feed the trolls." The comments were the basement of the internet. You didn't go down there.

Now? The comments are the show. They're screenshotted and posted, clipped for TikTok, aggregated into "discourse" roundups, and quoted in articles like the one you're reading right now. A viral post isn't really viral until its comment section becomes a separate, arguably bigger viral post. We have promoted the reaction to the main event and demoted the thing being reacted to.

I'd like to make the case that this is quietly making us worse at loving things.

The Comment Section Got a Promotion

How did this happen? Partly by accident, partly by design. Platforms figured out that engagement doesn't care whether you liked something or hated it — anger scrolls just as fast as joy, sometimes faster. So the reply became the unit of content. Twitter became a reply machine. TikTok built an entire format around reacting to other videos. YouTube's biggest stars are, increasingly, people watching things.

And we all adapted, because the reaction slot pays better than the fan slot. Being the person with the sharpest take on the season finale gets you more followers than being the person who simply loved the season finale. Nobody ever went viral for a nuanced "I enjoyed that, and here's why."

There's also a status inversion at work. Being a fan — earnestly, openly, unironically loving something — used to be the default. Now it reads as a little naive. The cool position is the analytical one, the ironic one, the one with a critical distance. We've turned consuming culture into a performance of discernment, and discernment mostly looks like complaining.

When Everyone's a Critic, Nobody's in the Audience

Here's the thing about criticism: it's easy to do badly and feels identical to doing it well. Watch any show with your phone in hand, composing your take as the credits roll, and you're not really watching the show. You're watching a rough draft of your commentary.

The result is a strange flattening. The discourse around a show — the casting debates, the think-pieces, the finale meltdowns — can become bigger than the show itself, to the point where plenty of people engage with the discourse without ever watching the thing. They know all the takes and none of the scenes. Culture as a spectator sport, where the sport is arguing.

And there's a real cost to the thing being discussed. Artists can feel it. Creators now make work bracing for the reaction, hedging against the screenshot, sanding off anything a quote-tweet could weaponize. That's not a recipe for bold art. That's a recipe for focus-grouped art — which, coincidentally, we also complain about.

The Radical Act of Just Liking Something

I'm not arguing criticism is bad. Criticism built every art form we have; good critics are the immune system of culture. But criticism works when it's downstream of love. You tear apart a show because you wanted it to be better. The modern mode isn't that — it's critique as content, detached from any investment in the source, optimized for the screenshot.

So here's my modest proposal, offered knowing it will be quoted disapprovingly somewhere: every once in a while, experience something without producing anything about it. Watch the movie without live-posting. Listen to the album all the way through before deciding what you think of it publicly. Let the take go unposted. Nobody needs to know you had a feeling.

The comment section won — fine. It's entertaining, occasionally brilliant, and genuinely funny in a way the stuff above it often isn't. But the whole point of culture was never the argument afterward. The point was the thing itself — the song that hits, the scene that gets you, the book you press into a friend's hands without a single critical framework.

Be a critic if you want. But every so often, be a fan. It's the less prestigious job, and it's the one that actually matters.