Essay
A constraint is a form of attention. Here is the argument for measuring verbs, and an honest account of what the measurement can and cannot do.
Most social platforms optimise for the sentence that arrives fastest. A reaction costs nothing: a pronoun, a feeling, a gesture at a subject everyone already agrees on. The result is a timeline full of heat and short of movement.
Verbthinking adds one constraint. Every post must contain at least thirty-five per cent verbs. Not as a stylistic preference — as a check that runs on the server, on every post and every long reply, before anything is published.
A verb is a commitment. “The council rejected the budget” says who acted and what they did. “There were issues” says nothing you can check: nobody acted, nothing moved, and no one is accountable.
Verbs carry action, change and consequence. You can write a sentence with no nouns and still know what happened — “she refused, resigned, left”. A sentence with no verbs is just a label. The 35% floor asks every post to contain something that happens.
Part-of-speech tagging is statistical. Our engine uses a lexicon and rule-based tagger, counts action verbs and helper verbs such as “is”, “was” and “have”, excludes links, handles, emoji, punctuation and bare numbers, and divides by the remaining eligible words. It will occasionally disagree with a careful human reading.
The bar is fixed at 35%, because a rule that moves is not a rule. Exactly 35% publishes; anything below it does not. The meter in the composer, the reply box, the number on every post and the check that runs when you press Post all use the same calculation, so what you see is what publishes.
Constraint writing has a long history: the sonnet, the lipogram, the six-word story. Writers use limits to defeat the default. A verb floor does something similar for conversation — it makes the passive, blameless reply harder to send and the concrete one easier to find.
The research questions are simple. Do conversations with more verbs describe actions more clearly? Do they hold onto more replies? Are they more useful to read a week later? We publish what we measure rather than what we hope.
Verbthinking is an experiment in deliberate conversation. Every public post carries its own verb share, so you can judge the claim for yourself.