Stitch incoming: How the reaction economy went from commentary to rewarding condemnation

Shaikh Fardeen, co-admin of Mumbai-based Instagram meme page Andheriwestshitposting, estimates that 70-75% of the videos he creates are reaction videos. “It's mostly when someone says something stupid,” he says. “It irks me enough not to stay silent. It's a basic human inclination to give gyan, especially when no one has asked.” And the apps support it. “Instagram’s green screen filter—which allows your cutout to hover over another content clip—is the main reason this has become such a big scene, since the app pushes its own filters and gives creators customisation.” It's gone so mainstream that a client recently approached the marketing agency Fardeen runs, with Melvin Sadankar, asking for reaction-format videos to be used as Meta ads.

Look at your feed on any given day, and you’ll find reaction content everywhere: Comedians laughing over a viral meme on a group video call, a creator dissecting a news story, a feminist calling out a podcast bro, a de-influencer dunking on a brand’s misstep. Every major social media platform now gives us a built-in way to consume a piece of content through someone else’s response to it. And it may be changing how we form opinions, handle disagreement, and debate.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

The reaction video’s lineage stretches back nearly 15 years to the fine brothers entertainment youtube channel react, which currently has over 20 million subscribers. The premise was simple: film yourself watching a music video, movie trailer or viral clip and let your face do the talking. People tuned in because there was something oddly satisfying about watching someone react the way they themselves might have. The pandemic industrialised the format, turning it into a no-script, low-production escape hatch for people who had a phone, an internet connection, and a lot more time on their hands.

What began as people sharing moments of delight, surprise, or disbelief, gradually became commentary, then critique and, increasingly, condemnation. Twitter (now X) gave the reaction format a ‘quote tweet’, launched in 2015. Introduced as a way to add perspective to a retweet, it soon became something else in practice—a pile-on tool. It even spawned its own vocabulary. To be “ratioed”, when the quote tweets or replies to your post far outnumbered its ‘likes’, became shorthand for public rejection, a sign that the internet had collectively turned against you. Instagram went one step further. “Stitch Incoming” functions like a drumroll before the takedown. None of this happened by accident. Each of these features was a product decision made by someone, signed off by someone, shipped by someone.

Amrita Tripathi knows this world well. Now the founder of independent publishing house Say Again Press, she was head of content partnerships at Twitter India during the years the quote tweet found its footing. “The quote tweet, as intended, was a helpful feature,” she recalls. It allowed you to add your own take, go beyond a vanilla retweet. “It's always easier to misuse features like this, and fundamentally, this is a flaw that feels quite baked into the attention economy,” she says. Tripathi doesn't think the quote tweet was ever seen as a negative from inside the building while she was around (she moved on in December 2022). “It probably still isn’t, by the folks who have had the good fortune not to be piled on, online.”

Muskan Madaan, 25, a feminist content creator from Patiala, says reaction videos work because they don’t just offer commentary but relief. “I think my audience likes reaction videos because of the difference in emotions,” she says. “The first part makes them feel angry, then the stitch comes, and they calm down when I say my piece. I’ve understood this emotion graph now,” she adds. Only about 10% of her content consists of reaction videos.

COMMENTS VS DEBATE

Reacting to others also means opening yourself up to the same scrutiny. Being on the receiving end of reaction videos has also shaped how Madaan approaches the format. “I try to make my points without shaming or hurting the other person—just make my point respectfully.” The format, however, carries consequences, beyond snarky comments from the affected party. A startup founder's team once reached out saying one of her reaction videos had hurt their marketing and asked her to take it down. Madaan refused. Another reaction video, this time about a comedian, led to a copyright strike that temporarily got her account banned.

What she avoids is taking those debates offline. She has been invited onto podcasts by people whose views she finds objectionable, but always declines. “I'd rather not use my energy debating them. They’ve already made up their mind.” Online, she can reach her own audience and take her time. A live debate, Madaan says, would only drain her. It’s a telling distinction. The internet has become extraordinarily good at facilitating reactions, but it may be getting worse at encouraging conversations.

Anindita Chatterjee, a Delhi-based counselling psychologist who also creates psychology content on Instagram, sees the consequences playing out in her therapy room, in, “people who struggle to tolerate discomfort, sit with grief, or stay with a feeling long enough to understand what they're actually experiencing”. The reaction economy may be “engineering out the ability to have healthy arguments—to agree, disagree, and all the while be respectful about it,” she says. “We are extremely comfortable [reacting online] because we don’t have to lean in and repair if we end up hurting the human on the other side. In fact, there is no cognition that the human on the other side matters,” she says.

Not everyone sees the absence of debate as a failure. Aman, better known on Instagram as @Ghalibankabir, doesn't think reaction videos should be judged by the standards of a live debate. “Debating is a skill,” says the 28-year-old writer from Mumbai, “not everybody has it.” For him, the format’s real value lies in how “you can put up a video, the other side can respond, and that way everybody gets a chance to analyse and give a rebuttal.”

He pushes back on the idea that reactors and “reactees” exist in silos. “The overlap is more than you’d think. Some people didn't even know about the people I called out. This way a larger audience gets to know this person is problematic.” The people he calls out, he clarifies, are rarely the obviously objectionable. The reaction video exposes the gap between someone’s public persona and the actual positions they take.

AN EMPTY ECHO CHAMBER?

At the same time, Aman acknowledges that accountability rarely comes from the people he is reacting to. More often than not, they simply block him. Calling out popular creators has also cost him followers—his count is at a little over 81,000 right now. Ironically, he cannot remember ever changing his mind after watching someone else’s reaction video. None of the creators we spoke to could recall a single such instance, in fact.

This isn’t particularly surprising for Usha Raman, a retired communications professor from Hyderabad who has spent years studying digital spaces. “Big Tech is now the biggest intermediary between citizens and public life,” Raman says, “and it operates on algorithmic logic, not civic logic.” The potential of a piece of content to prompt reaction is mediated by that logic, and that’s where the commodification of reactions comes in. Hence, “participation has become performance”, as she puts it. Performance, unlike dialogue, does not aim for anyone to change. “What we lose when we speak behind screens is a full appreciation of who is speaking, in all the fullness of their identities,” Raman says. “We lose the possibility of a more considered, respectful, open conversation.”

She is careful not to dismiss what the reaction economy has made possible. “Earlier it was those few stuffy individuals who had the language and the access—who could write letters to the editor or acquire a stage to speak from.” Today, far more people, especially from diverse and marginalised backgrounds, can participate in public discourse. “The digital space also allows for thoughtful use,” adds Raman. “Perhaps we need to build and nurture that appetite for complexity.”