At the same time, though, we are now hyper-aware of the lives of tangential acquaintances and former classmates. Humans are driven to compare themselves against others; social media gives us easy access to millions of people to measure ourselves against. The phenomenon of upward social comparison takes place when we see snapshots of the seemingly perfect lives of celebrities and influencers, and find ourselves wanting in contrast.

Soft troll behaviours like hate-following, meanwhile, are a form of downward social comparison, where we pit ourselves against people we feel are somehow inferior in a bid to feel better about ourselves. That can seem like a form of relief, Fox Weber suggests, allowing us to “jump from the discomfort of feeling inferior and lonely in our envy to feeling haughtily aligned” (ie feeling united in our temporary sense of superiority) with, say, the others in our group chat.

“You get to feel superior, even triumphant, in joining up perspectives, however warped,” Fox Weber says. Lurking on a site like Tattle Life without posting can prompt particularly intense schadenfreude: not only can we judge the influencers, but we can also judge the users for writing about them with such rancour (while conveniently absolving ourselves of any guilt).

One of the few studies into this behaviour, a 2016 study from researchers at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, found that “darker” motivations for following others, like insecurity or schadenfreude, were associated with lower self-esteem, higher levels of need for popularity and even narcissism; hate-followers were also more likely to accept a friendship request from a high-school acquaintance who had suffered some form of setback.

Rise of the soft troll: why do we (privately) pick apart strangers on the internet?