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A Thread About Terrible Internet

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KvP:

The extra letter:

--- Quote from: Blue Kitty on 04 Mar 2011, 19:29 ---What a terrifying world that would be


Also I find it funny that the My Biggest Regret site seems to be mostly young people.

--- End quote ---
You can just imagine them having a new Biggest Regret pretty much each day.

"THIS was my biggest regret. No, wait, now THIS is my biggest regret. Hold on, THIS is..."

Jimor:
News site comments have one potentially useful purpose. Trace the IP#s so that come the revolution, we know exactly who to put up against the wall first.

To me, another interesting phenomenon was my experience with LiveJournal a few years ago. I mostly lurked and posted on friends' blogs rather than keeping my own, which led to viewing a larger circle of mostly aspiring writers. At first it was all a pretty good mix of different posts, both good and bad in peoples' lives, and also progress reports on writing projects, story/novel submissions to various publications/publishers/agents.

Over time what happened, though, was that bad news generally got more responses of sympathy than good news got responses of shared happiness. This response pattern acted as a very powerful incentive that essentially trained everybody to bitch and moan in order to garner supportive replies. When you combine this with the fact that most writers and most works are going to get repeatedly rejected before any successes, and we really had a formula for disaster.

Somebody would post that their story had been rejected yet again, and the chorus of sympathy would start. "Oh drat, better luck next time!" "I really liked that story, I'm surprised the editor didn't like it." "The editor is blind, I don't know how they could reject it!" "He probably didn't have room because he was buying stuff from his friends..." Each person had to outdo the last in "understanding" the situation, and as time went on, the explanations and conspiracy theories of how everything is stacked against "pre-published" authors and it's all cronyism, blah blah blah. Everybody stopped looking inward to try to improve because it was now all somebody else's fault they weren't successful.

This bled over into personal matters as well. The ones who got the most attention were the ones who were always describing the smallest setback as "living in hell" and gathering a coterie of followers who would offer a shoulder to cry on. I have to admit, that while I wasn't a frequent poster, I also offered my sympathy some of the time and I was generally blind to these trends and didn't notice how bad it had become. Until one particular incident.

Me and a couple of friends sold stories to a fairly high-profile anthology. Out of 950 submissions, 19 made it. We posted about our news, and each received a small smattering of congratulations. But then somebody who had been rejected by this editor posted that seeing all the congrats on her feed was depressing her.

There was an absolute FLOOD of responses. One of the people who had replied to me apologized to her for being so insensitive. Lot's of posts about how wrong it was to rub salt in her wounds like that. Meanwhile, on the blogs of the 3 of us who sold, crickets chirping.

I realized then that everybody in that community were mutually supporting each other to oblivion. It was no longer about writing, or learning the craft and getting better at it. It was about being seen as a writer to other people who wanted to be seen as writers. Far more effort and energy was going into thousands of words of blog posting than ever reached the pages of their manuscript. I quietly abandoned my blog then deleted it.

I may not have had much success since that sale, but I know that it's mostly my own fault and my responsibility. And since then, I've tried hard to surround myself with friends who have a positive attitude and at least try to strive for more rather than those who let life pass them by while blaming outside forces for their unhappiness. It's not that life doesn't have times that suck when we need a sympathetic ear. It's what we do once we've processed those setbacks and work out our next step.


tl;dr blog communities usually devolve into morasses of whining and negativity. Stay away.

KvP:
Oh I hear that. I was only able to recently break free of a gaming community I was a part of - I had convinced myself over time that there were "good" gaming boards and "bad" gaming boards, but the fact of the matter was that if you had people registering to talk about games, you were going to get a pretty nightmarish board. After the 9,000th thread going back and forth over the immorality of DRM / the virtue of piracy, I had suffered enough. Now the trick is to keep up with news without interacting with the forums - oftentimes news will break about my favorite developers weeks or months prior to it going public.

allison:

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