Table of Contents
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” (Dictionary.com entry); on Twitter it is subtweeting, and the general practice is vagueposting (Wikipedia).
Adapted from 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, Berryman, McHugh, Wisniewski, Ferguson, and Negy (2022) studied vaguebooking alongside 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 "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 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 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. The Art and Harm of Subtweeting covers the social damage directly.