How NOT to Deal with Online Critics

~ Laura

I’ve been bloggin, tweeting, writing, and keeping a general internet presence for more than ten years. If you put yourself “out there,” at some point someone will hate you. Some people will really hate you and write nasty things on the internet that demean your intelligence and question your value as a human being. Occasionally, there will be people who threaten you. There may be even people who locate your address. How does one deal with that?

Putting opinions and thoughts and words on the Internet is not for the faint of heart. The first year that I began blogging, some blogger with lots of traffic wrote stupid things about my research, and I freaked out a bit. A wiser friend told me not to deal with bad criticism and to give others credit for recognizing stupidity when they see it. When I started writing pieces for the popular press, the criticism rolled in on the comment sections. I learned how to lightly skim comments without actually reading them. An anonymous grad school website made rude comments about my scholarly merits. I had already built up a pretty tough skin, so none of it bothered me.

I have never been threatened, so I’m pretty lucky in that regard. I’m not sure how I would handle all that.

A recent article in the Guardian by a young author is a case study in how NOT to handle online criticism. She tracked down the address of a woman who wrote a bad review on Goodreads and went to her house. The author understands that she had stepped over the line into Crazy Town, but she still did it. She made herself more pathetic than the rude reviewer. She’s a recent graduate from Harvard. Youth and lack of experience with criticism explains a lot.

Taking criticism is part of modern lilfe. If you’re a professor or a teacher, student can leave reviews online. If you own a business or a restaurant, there’s Angie’s List and Yelp. These websites have empowered a whole class of people to tell off others who seem to have more power, money, or success. In some ways, these new avenues for criticism is very democratic. It’s useful for me as a consumer. Well, useful-ish. I’ve learned to how to read all the comments and find an average opinion.

Dealing with negative comments can be annoying for producers of words and ideas, but critical comments aren’t always terrible. Some criticism is valid. I’ve had to rethink and rework blog post and articles at times. I’m not perfect. And since I really do enjoy debates, I actually love smart criticism. Dumb comments from anonymous sources should simply be ignored. I can’t imagine caring enough to track down the address of a critic.

Published by Laura

21 thoughts on “How NOT to Deal with Online Critics”

  1. That was a great article. It’s very rare that somebody can go that unhinged and still write a coherent account of it.

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  2. I think there are two stories here, the whole “don’t engage the trolls” but also the catfishing. That second part fascinates me. When I first started hanging around the internet, I was on adoption.com quite a bit. There was a woman who created this whole persona for herself. She was beloved and funny and seemed really wise. It turned out that only her role in adoption was true. Everything else about her life was a story. When she was outed she vanished. It made me sad, not that I was duped, but this person obviously felt bad enough about their life to create a persona. The Hale troll did it to have power and be mean, but how many do it to live the life they wish they were living, if only online?

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    1. A lot of people do not think that the reviewer was catfishing. She was using a pseudonym, which is a different thing. Catfishes do it for some sort of emotional reason; they cannot connect with others without the “security” of a false identity. I’ve used pseudonyms and blurred (um, don’t want to talk about how/what I did to blur) identities, but mainly as a strategic way to keep from being found by anyone I might tick off, which is kind of the point Hale proves.

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    2. Some people “catfish” for mere fun (I don’t now the term, but I’m thinking it means pretending to be someone you’re not?).

      I do not like “blurred” pseudonyms (have a real issue with pseudonymous reporting in articles, too, like books like “Overachievers” where the kids are given pseudonyms. I understand the reasons, but it always damages the story for me.

      I do not use my full name on the internet, and I sometimes use different abbreviations of my name, but I also try to write under the assumption that my comments can be directly connected to me in real life, if someone wants to. My use of pseudonyms is to circumvent googling that connects everything I do into one easy page on Google.

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  3. Also, this article seems like it would be a great movie. How they are both just steps away from madness in little ways, and how far someone will go to control their narrative.

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    1. I have to take issue with the idea that they are both “steps away from madness.” Online activities are … a thing. You connect with other people who share your interests. It’s great. What’s bad is when the producers of the interests get involved. I have been in tv fandom a looooong time. I like to bitch about the writers/producers/actors/storylines. I share gossip. I share spoilers. But most of all I bitch. (Or I used to–age has mellowed me a bit.) I want to be able to do that about public figures and public offerings. It does not make me a bully or an insane person to express rude opinions to fellow fans. I don’t follow tv creators/actors to their homes*; the blogger in question never went to the writer’s home or showed any inclination to do so. This writer, however, went to HER home and called HER workplace. That is fucking insane.

      *OMG, once, though, I had a friend from out of town visiting me in NYC, and we walked over the Brooklyn Bridge to go to Patsy’s and took a short cut through a few deserted streets in Brooklyn Heights and came across Melina Kanakaredes and her husband entering their apartment building. We kind of freaked out because this friend from out of town was a fellow Guiding Light fan and MK was on GL at the time. We felt *really* weird about that but I swear it was a coincidence!

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      3. If the TV show keep getting better and better, but the audience keeps shrinking, that doesn’t seem like a good trend. Back in the day, you could get nearly everybody to watch complete crap.

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    2. I agree that this is more normal behavior than one imagines, that it’s a fairly common occurrence, say, for folks to “stalk” someone on the internet.

      I don’t agree that anonymity makes ridiculing/deriding public figures OK. Being public shouldn’t mean that people feel free to say things to you that they wouldn’t say to a real person, that they know. And, anonymity can really blur the line about who a “public” person is. Obama is. He’s basically signed on to it by being president and has to figure out ways to manage the craziness he inspires. He also has people to help him with the craziness (including security, when the crazy gets insane, but also publicists and assistants to manage the comments and attacks). Laura, on this blog, is not a public figure. We might cross bounds sometimes in comments (I don’t know that I would have complained about the jeans she was thinking about purchasing, if I met her in the carpool lane at school).

      A first author of a book is not a public person, either, and, neither are many of the internet bloggers, some of whom might have written books. Some bloggers might be public people, but, they are still deserving of being treated like people.

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      2. I have no problem with stalking someone on the Internet. I just have a problem with doing anything based on that info. I devoted a lot of time once to uncovering the identity of someone posting spoilers (we called them foilers–fake spoilers) for Buffy. Why? S/he was claiming to be someone associated with the show; I knew s/he wasn’t. I uncovered the sockpuppetting going on. I regret none of that. I didn’t care *who* the person was, just that s/he *wasn’t* a Buffy insider.

        “Being public shouldn’t mean that people feel free to say things to you that they wouldn’t say to a real person, that they know. ”

        I don’t know about that. I think that’s one of the problems of our media. They know the people they cover personally, so they tend to soften the criticism they might otherwise feel free to express.

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      3. Wendy said:

        “I have no problem with stalking someone on the Internet. I just have a problem with doing anything based on that info. I devoted a lot of time once to uncovering the identity of someone posting spoilers (we called them foilers–fake spoilers) for Buffy. Why? S/he was claiming to be someone associated with the show; I knew s/he wasn’t. I uncovered the sockpuppetting going on. I regret none of that. I didn’t care *who* the person was, just that s/he *wasn’t* a Buffy insider.”

        Fun!

        “I don’t know about that. I think that’s one of the problems of our media. They know the people they cover personally, so they tend to soften the criticism they might otherwise feel free to express.”

        Exactly–they’re married to each other, their kids go to school together, they may wind up being colleagues together eventually due to the government/media revolving door, etc. There are a lot of reasons for media people to pull their punches.

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  5. Using a pseudonym to review books you don’t want connected with your public profile is not catfishing.

    The Guardian article comes close to tl;dr for me. It’s surprising to the author that someone didn’t like her book? That’s a very privileged upbringing, indeed.

    I propose college creative writing workshops institute “real world transitions” seminars. Instead of taking great care to frame comments in a positive, supportive manner, participants must give criticism like a critic.

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  6. Well, to be fair, it was a lot more than someone disliking her book. It was someone siccing her minions and general nastiness on anyone who dared like it. I’m appalled that Goodreads allows that. Yuck. The value of the site plummets when one reviewer bullies others with different opinions.

    And although I don’t know what catfishing is, the reviewer had no just a pseud but a fairly well developed life she posted about that was all made up.

    I think the author was nuts, but I half applaud what she did and I’m just sorry she didn’t scare the daylights out of the equally nutso reviewer with a gun or a pitchfork or something.

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    1. That’s a joke, right? It’s hard to tell on the internet. I do believe that would be a criminal offense (threatening to harm someone with a gun or pitchfork.)

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  7. At times, I find it strange that my name and reputation are on the line, but my critics don’t take those sorts of risks. Yet, they expect to be treated as equals. No. (Again, not talking about the 11D commentariat.)

    A person who makes up a fake name to comment on a dumb YA novel on GoodReads needs to move to Nashville and get a life.

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