"But Twitter also builds in the tools to rip those inside jokes out of their context, to catapult them far outside their home communities, into distant and unsympathetic eyes."

"Twitter rewards high-context speech, and then gives us the perfect tool to decontextualize that speech. Twitter is designed to invite our vulnerability, and then punish it."

"Every joke is a trust fall. And every laugh is a direct experience of connection."

"All jokes require that the joke-teller and audience share some background knowledge. And that background knowledge needs to be unstated for the joke to work. A joke will absolutely fail if the teller tries to prepare the audience with an explicit declaration of the necessary background knowledge."

"The basic structure of a joke forces the teller to presume the existence of a shared background. The teller must take a risk, a leap of faith."

"We don’t just see the connection; we share the exact sense of humor needed to laugh at it."

"Every time we emphasize the connections of an in-group, we also emphasize their lack with outsiders."

"Every intimacy is also an alienation."

"The deep pleasure of the joke lies in having all those connections go off in your head in a dense, firecracker sequence."

"But your tweet can play off some rich shared background. It can gesture at what your audience already knows about you or draw on your shared history."

"A good tweet plucks at pre-existing strings."

"Twitter can’t give you the immediate, visceral experience of in-person laughter. But it gives you access to a very different—and seductive—social pleasure."

"You hurl an obscure joke into the void. To land, it needs to find a perfect confluence of shared background knowledge and emotional attitudes. But sometimes it all works out, and then Twitter rewards you with likes—sometimes a torrent of likes."

"The promise and pleasure of Twitter lies in our hope for finding this sudden, sharp, intimate connection. And this thought can explain why so much of Twitter tends towards comedy, irony, and shitposting."

"It forces us to depend on shared background context in order to create richly meaningful tweets."

"But when you write something in an intimate voice, intended for a specific community, you open yourself to having your words pulled out of context and radically misunderstood."

"And the mechanism for context-shredding is built directly into Twitter. It’s the retweets."

"A couple of unlucky retweets, and suddenly your tweet is splayed across tens of thousands of screens of people who don’t share your background context, who can’t interpret your tweet properly."

"Jokes are read straigh"

"It’s that Twitter’s basic structure—its shortness, the promise of connection with strangers—draws out of us these vulnerable, context-dependent stabs at intimacy."

"Twitter is built to reward us for these risky, high-wire walks on the thin strand of shared context."

"The platform makes it easy for any user to rip something out of context and activate the pleasures of another kind of intimate connection—the gratifications of shared outrage,"