I think that that the main problem with a lot of social media stuff in terms of ratings is it's a very skewed motivation.

People do things with terrible motivations and those motivations are selfish and self-interested and financially driven.

I am not on Facebook. I'm not on Instagram. I only use Twitter, which I wish I didn't.

A million years ago, when doing research about the world of municipal government, one thing that struck me is how often people's job titles changed - from one department to another, from the public to the private sector and back again. People move around a lot, everyone has her eye on some other, slightly better situation in some other corner of city hall. Plus governments are constantly shuffling and reorganizing and shuttering or condensing departments - they are often byzantine hodge-podges of fractured org charts lying atop a bed of shifting sand.

I would far rather add a character who generates strong feelings than someone who just kind of floats along, generating medium-warmth smiles of gentle affirmation.

Every city, every town, every region in USA has these weird things - the way they pronounce words, or what they call soda, or how people drive. It's a huge country, and there's all these strange pockets of behavioral patterns that social anthropologists could spend lifetimes researching and reporting on.

You should be nice to people because it's better to be nice to people than mean to people, not because you think there's something in it for you.