So when a few million people read a post, there’s always somebody. https://twitter.com/emncaity/status/1333667582042402816

It’s actually a very interesting question: What is the function of “so“ in social media discourse?

I hadn’t considered it before. I think it’s an informality marker. It’s like you’re picking up an ongoing *conversation* instead of broadcasting a proclamation out into the world.

(And please don’t be rude to the original poster. Tone aside, I appreciate the couple of minutes of linguistic curiosity that their comment elicited.)

And to be clear I think it’s quite interesting to consider how it is moved from conversational use into use in a social media context. Our social media posts are not direct transcriptions of speech, so it seems to me it’s use may be somewhat different in that written context.