====== Vagueblogging ======

Vagueblogging is posting about a person, situation, or feeling in deliberately ambiguous terms: enough to signal that something is wrong, not enough to say what. The Facebook-era term is "vaguebooking" ([[https://www.dictionary.com/culture/slang/vaguebooking|Dictionary.com entry]]); on Twitter it is subtweeting, and the general practice is vagueposting ([[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagueposting|Wikipedia]]).

Adapted from [[https://brennan.day/vagueblogging-and-subtweeting-are-awful/|Vagueblogging and Subtweeting Are Awful]] on brennan.day.

===== What It Is =====

The vague post performs disclosure without making one. Readers feel the weight of a confession with none of the content, and the poster gets the relief of having said something while denying having said anything. Academically, [[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563222002588|Berryman, McHugh, Wisniewski, Ferguson, and Negy (2022)]] studied vaguebooking alongside [[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281627050_Fuzzy_Facebook_privacy_boundaries_Exploring_mediated_lurking_vague-booking_and_Facebook_privacy_management|privacy-boundary work by Child and Starcher]]; the behavior sits at the intersection of disclosure and concealment.

===== Why It Persists =====

Two theories explain the appeal:

  * **Context collapse.** Marwick and boyd's [[https://tiara.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Marwick_boyd_TweetHonestly.pdf|"I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately"]] (2011) showed that on social platforms the imagined audience is everyone at once: friends, family, colleagues, strangers. Vagueposting is what disclosure looks like when you cannot control who reads it.
  * **Disinhibition.** John Suler's [[https://johnsuler.com/article_pdfs/online_dis_effect.pdf|online disinhibition effect]] (2004) describes how anonymity and asynchronicity loosen the norms that would otherwise stop the post from being written.

There is also a defense: sometimes you need to express that something happened while protecting identities, processing something too raw to name, or commenting on a conflict you witnessed but are not part of. See [[https://wholoveskitty.wordpress.com/2017/09/27/in-defense-of-vague-posting-vagueblogging-subtweeting-etc/|In Defense of Vagueposting]].

===== The Cost =====

The practice corrodes the commons it uses. Readers cannot tell whether they are the target, friends perform worry in replies, and the poster confirms nothing. It converts the feed into a guessing game: communication that makes the audience do the emotional work of the message. [[https://wisesova.pitt.edu/art-harm-subtweeting/|The Art and Harm of Subtweeting]] covers the social damage directly.

===== See Also =====

  * [[indieweb:start|IndieWeb]]
  * [[indieweb:trust_online|Trust and Faith Online]]
  * [[indieweb:community|Community]]
  * [[indieweb:syndication_vs_participation|Syndication vs. Participation]]
  * [[start|Return to wiki home]]