I think the point of communication is to communicate. People who “have no filter” aren’t communicating because they don’t care how their words are received. (ETA, neither are those who send emails to cover their ass, just to prove they ‘communicated’) Knowing your audience is half the battle, right? I am harshly straightforward with other people who are, because if they can dish it they better be prepared to take it. But mostly I try to speak in a way that can be received by the person I’m talking to.

I’m ok with the no filter people unless it’s someone using it as an excuse to be mean, that does happen. “I’m just brutally honest!” No. You are not.

Everyone has various filters they use depending on the audience. Some may use stronger filters, some may barely ever filter. But everyone does it.

It is smart to frame communication around the audience as without considering the listener, you may not be communicating at all and instead are just making noises that fall on deaf ears.

About the #1 thing for me to loosen up socially was to avoid lists of things you have to “stop doing immediately” and shit like that because they get me in my head, then I’m triple-thinking everything and saying nothing.

Rather than “do not” tips I try to focus on “do” tips for people improving socialization.

“Showing interest and asking questions” is a #1 tip which precludes you doing a lot of rude things.

If you swear a little while doing that, no one is going to be upset.

TL;DR;

IMO, communicative tailoring is better than full masking, it required a lot of practice (for me) but was entirely worth it.

Disclaimer, all of this is incredibly subjective and YMMV.

My thoughts used to be “They have absolutely no clue how much filtering is happening” followed by a serious consideration on whether or not i’m putting in as much effort as i care to, to communicate with this person.

I’ll up the translation if i feel the juice is worth the squeeze, but nowadays it’s rarely an issue.

I’d like to be clear that i consider “masking” and “translation” to be distinct practices.

In this context, masking is an effort to tailor your communication to others with no real regard (or understanding) of the cost to benefit ratio or the long term impact of such a practice on your mental health, it’s a full time acting gig to pretend to be something other than your full self.

What i call translation(or tailoring) is more like taking your existing personality and tailoring it to emphasise aspects that you feel would work better for communication with said person. There’s little loss of personality fidelity and it feels a lot less like acting.

I understand it can sound the same, but it’s an important distinction for me personally , because the latter is significantly less effort and still maintains my personality , which allows me to filter out who i do and don’t want to communicate with.

For me it did take a significantly longer time to build up the social skill to be able to understand enough about people to tailor to them (for me, straight masking requires less upfront skill), but the result was worth it to me.

As a bonus, that additional required social skill makes all other related tasks easier as well.

Not to say that full masking isn’t a useful tool sometimes, but it’s like any other tools, in that it should be used in appropriate situations with an eye to the potential outcomes of doing so and will require practice and judgement to get the outcomes you want.

You could full mask through mandatory bullshit business meetings that serve no purpose other than to make someone underqualified for their job feel like they are important, for instance.

The real secret bonus to this tailoring is that I’ve found a broader range of people who fit the criteria of “my people” and also a generally expanded social experience, even with people i don’t actually like very much.

So long as it stays on topic, I don’t much give a fuck about politeness or how blunt you want to be with your message.

Also not talking about religion, politics, sex and related items is precisely what makes a human ignorant and disrespectful, not many things are worse than willful ignorance and the consequences thereof.

I have an excellent filter, not talking to people. Works every time.

I’ve been masking for 40 years and I’m done. Never again.

They are correct. Worst things I’ve done or said in my life were because of no filter - regarding the said, i usually didn’t even mean it.

I think it’s a good practice. Hopefully it gets stronger with practise.

I have a pretty tight filter, I think. No one has ever told me I needed to talk less, or more judiciously. However, I have a filter for a reason, and the filter isn’t 100% effective. I think it’s something I get better at with practice though.

My brain has a font of mostly nonsense running more or less all the time. I don’t hear it all the time the same way I don’t hear a clock all the time, but I don’t think it ever shuts off completely.

I say it’s mostly nonsense because every once in a while, maybe by random chance, it’ll produce an idea that merits a second look. 99% of those ideas are, on second look, gibberish, but every once in a rare while it’ll be a bona fide coherent thought.

Paying attention to the font is great for solo work where one can really sift through the shit, but I can also use it to “think fast” in a conversation. This may be an argument, the kind where talking just to take up space is an allowed thing to do for some reason. It may be a riff on a suggestion in a spitballing session. It may be a joke that depends on very quick timing to work.

The problem with relying on this type of quick-fire type thinking, for me, is that it’s hard to turn on and off on a dime, especially before I was aware I was doing it. I found I would just… say a thought before I was even aware I’d thought it. Sometimes it would be funny, sometimes it would be weird, sometimes it would be gross or macabre, sometimes it wouldn’t make sense.

I think being able to catch these thoughts is a considerable net positive for me and my friends, so I practice. I may miss the occasional devastating retort, but I like being able to be deliberate about how I hold conversations with my friends. And my acquaintances. And my enemies. Being able to choose one’s words well is a valuable skill that not everyone has.

P.S.
If I had to express my filter in terms of a folksy idiom, it would be “think before you open your mouth”. I heard this a lot growing up and, while it did usually just mean “be quiet”, it’s also kind of how my brain catches those thoughts that would have slipped out. I feel the impulse to start talking before I really notice it happening, but if I can train myself to just not open my mouth right away, I get enough time for the rest of my brain to catch up and think about whether it’s really worth saying. Sometimes it is, a lot of the time I’m glad the catch worked.

I tell them I want to fuck my mother with a garden hose.

If someone is telling me that I need a filter and they’ve seen me interact with others, I’d probably listen as to why.

I think its polite to try to stay on topic and such and its a good skill to have but everyone is going to get to different levels vs their nature and its kinda situational. Like at work im in a disciplined state but if your flowing and loosening up ya may drop a lot of that.

I filter what people tell me all the damn time because they’re incompetent at basic communication.

If I can do that daily they can handle my occasional unfiltered speak too

I’ve always had an excessive filter pipeline that slowed me down. My partner always had no filter. It was like Katara with Toph (but easier than Toph, much much kinder and well meaning). After years we both somewhat met in the middle.

Let’s put it another way: I needed alcohol to shut those inhibitory filters down; she did not lol.

There isn’t a singular filter, it is a wide spectrum. There is a reason to have some filtering based on context, such as not shouting obscenities in a kindergarten class. While society tends to expect a pretty strong filter as part of conflict avoidance, it is possible to have a filter without suppressing expression just because people don’t want to hear it.

So it depends on who says that a filter is needed and the context.