The morning after Claire Wilmot's sister Lauren died, a former classmate who had not spoken to Lauren since high school found what was perhaps the only photo of the two of them together and posted it to Lauren's Facebook timeline, with "RIP" and a line about heaven gaining an angel underneath. It was how many of Lauren's close friends found out. Her own family, as Wilmot later wrote, had not yet been able to call people themselves. Wilmot wrote about the aftermath for The Atlantic in 2016, and her complaint went well past who broke the news first. The public tributes that followed, she wrote, were "syrupy posts that profoundly misrepresented who she was," reducing what was, by her own graphic account, an agonizing physical death (she describes her sister choking, dying in her arms) to platitudes like "everything happens for a reason." Her fix was not a queue where you wait your turn to post. It was closer to a refusal: if the deceased is not a close family member, she argued, do not take it upon yourself to announce the death online, and do not assume a public tribute is welcome just because someone else's was. Send a private message instead, she wrote, or better, pick up the phone.

That kind of restraint, favoring the phone call over the public post, is not what most people practice now, and I recognize the pull away from it in myself. Molly Levine, 28, who lost her father in 2023, told TIME she spent the early days of mourning agonizing over "whether you're going to be one of those people who posts or not," and when she finally did, ten days later, she crafted and carefully refined a 350-word caption, "cognizant of how uncomfortable I could make other people." Jennifer, 30, who asked TIME not to use her real name given the circumstances, lost a close friend to suicide in 2019 and watched her friend group enforce a different rule than Wilmot's: not silence, but hierarchy. "The etiquette was," she told TIME, "those closest to the deceased had the right to post, and their posts should be engaged with. If you weren't in the inner circle, the rule was: don't post." Nobody wrote that rule down; it was policed instead through disapproving looks and quiet gossip, not by anyone abstaining from social media altogether. Digital anthropologist Crystal Abidin, TIME reported, has interviewed young people experiencing the first death of a friend and found the friction there was rarely about outright competition. It was about timing and standing: who gets to grieve first, and how that measures against how close they actually were to the deceased.

Layered on top of that shift is an argument Wilmot would likely still reject: that visibility itself is part of recovery, not a violation of taste. Linguist Korina Giaxoglou told TIME the exposure is doing real work: "As a community, we need to see these expressions in order to recover. Otherwise, it's like we're hiding our emotions." Abidin's research, TIME reported, points to why that might hold outside the quiet Western default Wilmot was writing from: in the Asia Pacific region, where she conducts much of her fieldwork, loud public grieving is "how you show that you're a part of that community," and some funerals hire professional mourners specifically because louder crying signals how loved someone was.

The uncomfortable finding sits between those two positions. In a small set of interviews with young mourners, published as a 2022 study, psychologist Pelham Carter and co-author Rachel King found a pattern Carter described to TIME as frankly hypocritical: participants said their own posts came from a "genuine outpouring of grief," but assumed everyone else's were an attempt to get attention. Nobody thinks they are the one performing. Everybody suspects the person next to them is.

I do not think Wilmot was simply outvoted. Her sharpest point, that a platform built for tidy conclusions will keep flattening a specific, ugly death into a shareable platitude, is still true of every feed that came after Facebook's. What changed is the verdict on the alternative she offered. A private message and a phone call still cost the bereaved something a witnessed public grief does not, an audience, and a generation raised on the idea that visibility is how a community carries loss together can experience opting out of the public post as abandonment rather than restraint. Neither side doubts that something is owed to the person who died. They disagree, genuinely, about whether that something is quiet or witnessed.