Incident Record Concerning Profile Visit Discretion
A record of the precautionary behavior exhibited when viewing another person's social media profile at depth.
Summary
A user intends to view another person's profile. The action is voluntary. The platform does not announce the viewing to the subject of the visit. Despite this, the user adopts a cautious scrolling behavior designed to avoid accidental engagement with older posts. The caution is the incident.
Timeline
The user navigates to the profile. Scrolling begins. Speed decreases. The user becomes aware of the like button's proximity to the scroll path. An accidental like on a post from eighteen months prior is classified as a more serious event than deliberate viewing of all available content. The scroll continues at reduced speed.
Profile visit discretion receives a preferred place in the routine. This is the inflection point.
Contributing Factors
The action is voluntary, yet imagined observation by other people makes it feel governed by invisible rules. The rules are not stated anywhere in the platform's documentation. They are derived from social inference and the retrospective analysis of incidents that the user witnessed happening to other people. No incident involving this user has been recorded. The precaution is prophylactic.
A workaround for profile visit discretion outranks the inconvenience that originally created it. The original inconvenience is an accidental like. The workaround is sustained careful scrolling across all future visits regardless of whether the like risk is present. The workaround expands.
Current Status
People start planning around profile visit discretion before the triggering situation even occurs. The routine then defends profile visit discretion as necessary evidence of competence, courtesy, or control. These three justifications are used interchangeably.
Any repeated case of this behavior becomes standard procedure until someone deliberately replaces it. No replacement has been proposed. The incident record remains open.