Enough text walls!

The Negative Marginal Utility of Text Walls

By A. Random Economist, Ph.D.

In economic theory, marginal utility refers to the additional satisfaction a consumer derives from consuming one more unit of a good or service. Applied to online discourse, however, it becomes clear that beyond a certain threshold, additional text does not yield increased utility. Instead, the curve inverts: the longer the text, the greater the reader’s fatigue, until the marginal utility of each added paragraph turns sharply negative. This phenomenon, the negative marginal utility of text walls, can be observed most starkly on platforms like Reddit, where three sentences of provocation often yield three thousand words of rebuttal. The initial short-form poster enjoys a high “return on investment”: a few minutes of effort generate attention, anger, and engagement. By contrast, the respondent who produces the essay-length reply incurs vast opportunity costs in both time and mental energy, while simultaneously diminishing their persuasive impact.Economically, this dynamic resembles the classic model of diminishing returns in agriculture: a field overplanted does not produce more grain, but less. The law of online discourse is the same: the more words poured in, the less anyone wishes to read. The rational actor, therefore, should seek to minimize written labor while maximizing rhetorical effect. This explains the rise of meme replies, two-word dismissals (“L + ratio”), or image macros as dominant strategies. They embody efficient markets: fewer resources expended, greater impact achieved. Conversely, the producers of text walls engage in what economists would diagnose as a form of negative-sum signaling game: burning time and energy to prove seriousness, only to have their work devalued in the attention economy. In conclusion, the lesson for rational participants in online markets is simple: when marginal utility turns negative, stop writing.