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Reflecting on events of the past few days (and events more generally) I keep coming back to the idea that the internet would be a much nicer place if more people knew what it felt like to get the same criticism a thousand times from a thousand strangers.
To be clear, I& #39;m not saying more people should directly experience it: That would be a preposterous and cruel thing to advocate for. But if you haven& #39;t, I think it& #39;s worth trying to empathize with that position a bit more, because as someone who& #39;s been there, it sucks.
The main thing that I& #39;d want to get across is that it& #39;s not just a quantitative thing: The sheer volume of it all leads to a significant qualitative shift in the experience. It becomes something very different from simple criticism, and it becomes a lot harder to ignore.
I& #39;m not a psychologist, but I think that may have to do with the fact that our brains just weren& #39;t really built for social dynamics on the scale of the internet. In real-life social circles, if a thousand people go out of their way to tell you you& #39;re wrong, that& #39;s... a lot.
On the internet, though, a thousand isn& #39;t even that many. Audiences scale up to the hundreds of millions, and receiving even a mild criticism over and over that many times is exhausting, it& #39;s upsetting, and even if you know they& #39;re wrong it gets difficult to believe it.
(This is, of course, multiplied if the criticism *isn& #39;t* mild, if it& #39;s particularly severe in nature or if it just hits too close to home. That& #39;s worth keeping in mind too, but it can sometimes be hard to predict as the person sending the critique.)
This leads to a common complaint against people at the center of these sorts of things, where they get upset, push back, and then get criticized more because it seems like such an overreaction to "someone made fun of me."
But it& #39;s not just someone making fun. It& #39;s thousands of someones, all poking the same spot with a stick: Of course that spot will get sore. I& #39;ve avoided using loaded terms like "mob" because I don& #39;t want to trivialize real complaints, but subjectively, that& #39;s what it feels like.
I& #39;ve had to carefully regulate my exposure to my own comment section because of stuff like that. Sure, the actually nasty stuff is bad, but it& #39;s few and far between. By *far* the biggest stressor is seeing the same handful of trivial complaints over and over.
Like, I make jokes about it, but honestly every time I get a message telling me I& #39;m holding a pen wrong it stings a bit. Not because it& #39;s accurate, insightful, or meaningful. Like, can you imagine being the sort of person who cares that much about how a stranger holds a pen?
But it& #39;s something I& #39;ve been hit with so many times over the years that I& #39;ve had to build up specific mental defenses. And that& #39;s a ridiculous thing to have mental defenses against! Why should that even remotely matter to me? And yet, because of sheer repetition, it does.
And that dichotomy, where you a) know you shouldn& #39;t care, and b) can& #39;t stop yourself from caring is a really hard thing to explain to people who haven& #39;t been there. And that makes it isolating, because you know complaining will just make you look overly sensitive, but it& #39;s real.
I also think there& #39;s a tendency to assume that creators don& #39;t read the messages they get, which is likely a hold-over from traditional celebrity culture, but here& #39;s the thing: most of us don& #39;t have PAs. We& #39;re doing this ourselves, and we read more than you realize.
And also, not everyone who winds up on the receiving end of this is used to having an audience at all. Some may be smaller creators who just suddenly got attention, and others may just have had a tweet found and dunked on by the wrong person. Always assume they& #39;re reading.
(All this is on top of the fact that unsolicited criticism from strangers is actually almost never welcome? Like, in my experience very few people appreciate or listen to much of it, so the odds of your message being in any way helpful are tiny.)
(On the other hand, sometimes creators ask for feedback. That& #39;s solicited, and as such isn& #39;t covered by anything I& #39;m saying here. If I or anyone else asks for your thoughts on our work, feel free to give them. Don& #39;t be cruel, obv, but still, go ahead.)
(I should also take a second to note here that, despite all this, there may be circumstances where this behavior is warranted, necessary, or helpful. I& #39;m not really weighing in on that question right now, but even in those cases you should still be aware of what you& #39;re doing.)
I think a large part of the problem here is the diffuse nature of blame: No one& #39;s actually doing anything particularly wrong. They& #39;re just sending an often-polite message pointing out a potential issue. The problem arises not from individual actions, but collective volume.
On the scale of the internet, if a stranger& #39;s statement has crossed your path, odds are it& #39;s crossed a lot of other people& #39;s too, and unless you have some specific expertise in the question at hand, it& #39;s unlikely you& #39;ll actually have any unique insight.
(Also, to be 100% clear: Creators you follow are strangers, no matter how much of their work you& #39;ve watched. It may feel like you know us, but the relationship is ultimately extremely parasocial. Sorry. Y& #39;all are great, but I don& #39;t really know you individually.)
As such, here& #39;s a rule of thumb: If you& #39;re about to send an unsolicited negative message to someone you don& #39;t personally know, take a second to ask yourself "If I don& #39;t send this, is it likely someone else will?" and if yes, ask whether they really need to see it twice.
And, as a corollary, if you& #39;re doing it on a public platform and you have a large audience of your own, remember that a significant portion of that audience will *not* do the above, and reflect on how that will impact the overall volume of your critique before sending it.
