hypothesis: by filtering out posts on social media that conspicuously incorporate the word "y'all", you can eliminate a huge chunk of content that's not worthwhile
Side note: Languages sometimes follow rules that are absorbed rather than being spoken and taught. I grew up saying "y'all" in environments where it was common and then trained myself out of it as a a young adult. Most occurrences of "y'all" that I see on social media fail on the unspoken "rules" about correct use and placement. They instead read as very strained and unnatural. Most of these instances are ostentatious in a way that completely goes against the casual "spirit" behind the word.
@colby (pedantry: that's a contraction, not a word)
@colby You'd also end up catching pretty much any conversation involving folks from the Midwest, south and Texas where it's the preferred English equivalent to Spanish's "vosotros".
@BalooUriza nope. PS: I'm from Texas.
I'm not talking about ordinary, normal, natural use. I am specifically referring to the posts trying to _conspicuously_ use "y'all", and I wrote a more detailed comment in a followup referencing subtle "tells" that mark them as unnatural.
https://kosmos.social/@colby/105526861030385157
(This is a delete+redraft of an earlier comment that I fired off earlier, and I didn't like the way it sounded when I read it back just now.)
@colby Oh, yeah, it's obvious when it's used incorrectly. I had the advantage of Spanish being my second language. In the northwest, "y'all" just sticks out and people will sometimes struggle trying to find a collective direct pronoun. I've even seen "vosotros" just dumped like it's an English word. In the northwestern dialect, there's no word for this.
I'd like to think I mastered the transition rather naturally on this mostly because nobody's looked at me weird for using it here…
hypothesis #2: new popular stances against lurking and lurking behavior (e.g. "not approving follow requests from accounts without a bio"), is partly responsible for (or at least has a common cause with) what we perceive to be the tendency to toxicity associated with social media; people are selecting for strong ego and (over)confidence—and selecting against meekness and thoughtfulness