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The two cents are not literally monetary - your opinion is literally the two cents. You're contributing your understanding to the shared pot of understanding and that's represented by putting money into the pot, showing you have skin in the game. It's contributing to a larger body of knowledge by putting your small piece in - the phrases you suggest don't have that context behind them and in my opinion are worse for it. The beauty of the phrase is because the two cents are your opinion, everyone has enough, because everyone can have an opinion.

The lens through which you're analyzing the phrase is coloring how you see it negatively, and the one I'm using is doing the opposite. There is no need to change the phrase, just how it's viewed, I think.

people put too much weight onto words, the first lesson I learned on the internet is that words are harmless, might be deeply painful for some, but because people as my self put no weight behind them we don't even have a concept of keeping such things mindful since it never crosses our minds and it's really difficult to see if any other way even if we try to since it just seems like a bad joke.

And when I say 'it never crosses our minds' I really mean it, there's zero thoughts between thinking about a message and having it show up in a text box.

A really great example are slurs, for a lot of people they have to double take, but there's zero extra neurons fired when I read them. I guess early internet culture is to blame since all kinds of language was completely uncensored and it was very common to run into very hostile people/content.

> The metaphor of assigning a literal monetary value to one's opinion reinforces the idea that contributions are transactional and that their "worth" is measured through an economic lens. That framing can be exclusionary, especially for people who have been historically marginalized by economic systems. It subtly normalizes a worldview where only those with enough "currency" - social, financial, or otherwise - deserve to be heard.

No. It’s acknowledging that that perhaps one’s opinion may not be as useful as somebody else’s in that moment. Which is often true!

Your first and third paragraphs are true, but they don’t apply to every bloody phrase.