ICYMI - Being Professionally Awful Online Now Pays. That Is the Actual Problem

Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift · Apr 23, 2026 · 9m

Why people are meaner online has a cleaner answer than most people want to admit. Greg Fish ran the experiment himself: three months of deliberately aggressive posts on social media, taking bait, going for the gut punch. A million views on Threads. Follows, likes, subscriptions. The reward structure is not broken. It is working exactly as designed.

A Pew study asked people around the world whether they believe their fellow citizens are fundamentally good people. In Canada, 92% said yes. In the United States, 53% said the opposite, the highest in the survey. Those two numbers live on the same…