I Saw Those Comments You Left On That One User's Blog
I fear some of y'all need to be careful with the concept of brigading, and to... Whether it's accidental or not - avoid dragging someone for having a difference of opinion and perspective from you. Especially when it pertains to someone's personal experiences and what they choose to do for their own life and with their own blog.
Not everyone believes it's good to keep your nose glued to your phone, not everyone is good at handling a sudden wave of attention. Some of you may feel the urge begin pointing fingers and go "But this person moderates their own comments, its their own fault that they published contraversial or iffy ones!"
So you agree? The author of the blog was seeing at least some amount of contraversial and iffy comments that we may not have been fully privy to?
Look, I think that this blogging space can be a delightful one. I believe most folks with semi-public facing blogs here are nice folks. But this flash-in-the-pan revealed a side of ✨️ The Internet ✨️ that always seems to pop-up time and again. Yes, not even the good intentions of small internet and mindful scrolling can really curb this particular phenomena.
When you have a big, random group of people suddenly gather to one spot where it's easy to either fully agree or fully disagree, and they're essentially anonymous...? That comments section is gonna get trashed.
For posterity, I'm picking out some comments that illustrate my point. If you made any of these comments... Sorry, I'm sure your intentions weren't bad, but this is a quick and rugged vibes check, if anything.
"enjoy the reality... but dont complain if you find it worse. ( it is what it is )"
Weirdly hostile. The kind of thing you expect an extremely passive-aggressive, estranged parent to say.
"It is never as good as it seems or as bad as it feels. Take care"
Extremely dismissive?? Twisted form of "It gets better!"
"This too shall pass."
Dismissive.
"The voice of people is voice of God. (Khushwant singh quote in context of elections)"
Out of context, perfectly fine and fairly agreeable!
In context, we're telling the person behind their blog that ✨️ The Internet ✨️ is more important than whatever their real feelings are about thinking it's a net negative (Appreciated their use of net when describing the internet) The collective voice of The People should overwrite when someone says "I think thing kinda bad."
And this one's from the home guestbook, and most damning of all.
"coward, i liked your blog"
Like??? Y'all. Really now.
This is just a straight up lil' bully. That's just an intolerable way to act towards anyone who says they're on the precipice of deleting their blog. Specific commenter who called this blogger a coward? I think you're an asshole.
And you know what sucks here? When I stumbled onto all of this, and looked through this person's other stuff...? It's clearly high effort. This blogger has taken a lot of time to write very in-depth stuff. One of their other posts even exploded with likes!
But nobody seemed to comment on anything... Until this person lamented about the internet kinda sucking, and wanting to refocus.
Then that's when everyone and their mom started coming out of the woodwork.
I hope we can all see how that's an issue, right? If people only show up to yell down at others for feeling Bad and having Negative Opinions, then it's just a big feedback loop that's gonna amplify negativity. And yeah, I'm probably part of that feedback loop too, by making this to begin with.
But if I don't find anyone else pointing these issues out in a way that's at least nicer than what I'm doing here, then sorry. I'm gonna inundate you with my own take, finger wagging and all.
But hey, it's my own blog, where I'm yelling in my own room.
At least you can exit out if you wanted to. I'm hiding this here because I know you're listening by now, my personal and usual comment section is gonna be bait-and-switch for the folks who read part-way through and scroll all the way to the end once they read something that makes them kneejerk angry. It's going to link to a snippet of never gonna give you up. I'm going to say more things to obfuscate this information now. I hope you'll understand what I mean when I'm saying all this, and that I'm not myself being my own brand of dickwad - though you're certainly entitled to feel that way!
We need to remember that bloggers are essentially authors. They are artists, programmers, creatives in their own right. Do you really respect people who tell authors of deep, heavy shit that it's essentially not that serious?
Do you like people who act upset and weird when an artist says they're going to get rid of artworks that don't make them happy? Is that the kind of person you want to be...?
Or are you someone who values individual choices and beliefs - especially pertaining to creative endeavors? Well, here let's really simplify this, ok?
Just be nice to them - at the very least - while they're deciding whether to delete all their stuff or not. Oh my goodness, it isn't difficult to try being more nice to people.
Am I, myself, very nice here...? More nice than I could've been! I may be putting a few anon(?) commentors slightly on blast. If you know where to look and what the references are, you could probably find this blog with these comments for yourself - Maybe before things start getting deleted. But you know what? I at least give you the friction of needing to locate this stuff on your own. No links. Not even namedrops. I considered namedropping the impacted blog, but decided against it. Arguably much too kind.
But I like trying to exercise kindness wherever possible. I just might get a bit biting with it.
Hopefully that's okay by y'all. But if you disagree well... 💖