Social media doesn’t have a volume knob.
When you post something online, it gets broadcast at the same amplitude regardless of how confident you are. A half-baked shower thought gets the same megaphone as your life’s work. That’s broken.
The problem isn’t that people have opinions. The problem is that the natural spectrum of “I wonder if…” to “I’m quite certain that…” got flattened into a binary: you either say something publicly, or you don’t.
Think about how ideas actually developed in real life before all of this mess. You started with a vague intuition. Shared it with a friend over coffee. Maybe scribbled it in a journal. If it holded up, you shared it with more people. Eventually, if you’re really onto something, you wrote about it or gave a talk. There was a natural escalation that tracked with your confidence.
The internet short-circuits all of that. It hands you a microphone before you’ve even finished the thought.
Somewhere along the way, having an online presence started meaning having an opinion about everything. Every news event, every controversy, every trending topic demands your hot take. It’s exhausting.
Most of the time, I don’t actually know enough to have a meaningful opinion. And that’s fine. That’s the default state of being human. I can’t be an expert in geopolitics and epidemiology and economics and climate science and whatever else trending on X today.
But social media doesn’t seem to reward “I don’t know”. It rewards confidence, certainty, and speed. It rewards whoever can package their half-formed thoughts into a punchy thread first. So the people with the least to say often say the most.
Here’s a heuristic I keep coming back to: the publicity of your opinions should be directly proportional to your expertise.
This doesn’t mean I can’t have opinions outside my lane. It means that when I’m broadcasting to potentially thousands of people I need to have done my homework first. And try being transparent about it.
That’s harder than it sounds. Something big happens all the time, and I feel the pull to comment. Everyone else is. Don’t I have something to say? Sometimes the answer is no. And honestly, that’s the more interesting answer.
There’s a question underneath all of this that I keep asking myself: what’s the point of my online presence in the first place?
If the goal is just to maintain visibility, to keep the content machine fed, that’s a recipe for mediocrity. I end up contributing noise rather than cutting through it.
But if the goal is to be additive, to actually say something worth hearing, then I need to be way more selective. Can I meaningfully contribute here? Do I know something others don’t? Will this actually help someone? Most of the time, the honest answer is no. That’s my cue to shut up. My attention and expertise are finite, and spreading them too thin doesn’t help anyone.
The internet needs more of this. More people who understand that silence is often the most honest response. That “I don’t know” is a complete sentence. That the world doesn’t need another take on everything. What it needs is for you to speak up about the things you actually understand. Match your volume to your expertise.