I’m not a fan of hateblogging/hatesites.
I had a whole bunch of elaborate justifications here, but the real true reason is that if someone ever did that to my writing (which, admittedly, isn’t that good and has lots of Problematic tropes in it and of which you could probably come up with a quite biting mockery) I would never write again.
Every piece of art posted to a ‘delusional artists’ site was drawn by an artist- sure, a bad artist, but if you think that’s morally relevant here I honestly don’t know what to say to you – a person who might see it and watch their work circulate to be laughed at and that hurts. Some of them will give up on drawing forever.
Every terribly written fanfic on fanfiction.net was written by a person. And your nastiness will make them hesitate next time they try to put something they care about on paper.
This is true even if your nastiness is brave and clever and snarky. This is true even if the artist ‘thinks too highly of themselves’ or is ‘popular’ or is ‘more popular than they deserve’ or is an ‘attention [slur]’. This is true even if the artist reacts badly to criticism.
I don’t like the idea that a thick skin is mandatory to post art online, and that the lack of one is an extra thing to mock the artist for.
I don’t like the idea that, when an author says, ‘what you’re doing really fucking hurts me, and it would mean the world to me if you would just not talk about my work,“ “lol watch them have a public breakdown lol they can’t take criticism’ is a remotely appropriate response.
Tearing people down is not a superpower.
See also: exactly how I feel about GOMI
(Directed at both of you)
How do you guys feel about mocking smut? Both in the sense of “wow this exists” (Khal Drogo/Barney the Dinosaur crossover fics) and technical skill (“he shoved his big funstick in here moist meat cavern”).
What gets me is that people completely squander the potential of the Internet by building a unified identity on it. Like, you can do that in meat-space? In fact, having a single identity there is a very “opt-out” sort of situation! Whereas I’ve written things, drawn things, and sold physical fan-merch, but I’ve done it all under different names, all of which are different from the names I use when commenting on blogs, the emails I give to people I meet in meat-space, et cetera.
Looking back, I’ve never worried about having my work mocked, but if my Internet presence was just me, then I wonder if I might! Hell, I wonder if I’d have ever done any of the weirder projects I’ve done if they would automatically be associated with all of my other aliases or even my True Name, instead of being a single-project DeviantArt page I can abandon and resurrect at will if I close the project or want to give it another go.
Which also ties into something nostalgebraist said in this thread about the response to HPMOR, “Instead, the criticism is largely driven by things that people also dislike about EY’s nonfiction writing:“ Well, what if yudkowsky had published that story under a different name with no discoverable links to his other work? Why was it necessary to associate it with his True Name? And the key word is necessary. This is the Internet. The default should be anonymity and pseudonomity. If he didn’t have a specific, good reason to tie together the identity of “Less Wrong admin and writer of the Sequences,” and the identity of “author of HPMOR,” he should at least not have done so by default.
And if he hadn’t (or rather, if you hadn’t, Eleizer, because I’m honestly curious as to how you imagine yourself to have felt if you hadn’t, because otherwise I’m only going on my own internal experience with this) would it have made it easier for him to take the harsher criticism of HPMOR? Would you, theunitofcaring or you, slatestarscratchpad, perhaps be able to continue writing if you did not so much have your work brutally shot down, but were merely pretending to be an author whose work got brutally shot down?
Maybe you’d still have the same problem. I am curious, though, because I know I’m a lot more confident and experimental in the creative things I do on the Internet, because I do it with identities I’m not overly invested in.
I’m not either of those people (though, fittingly enough, I suppose you’ll have to take my word on that), but I might be able to help with your curiosity.
I’ve never understood the idea of an identity one isn’t invested in. It doesn’t matter to me, emotionally, whether people are insulting me-under-a-temporary-name or me-under-a-long-term-name. They’re still insulting me. I was, according to both memories and external records, much more nervous about interacting with people under the Brin name when it was new than I am now. (I think this is mostly because I didn’t have as much experience yet with the communities I was in, so didn’t have as good an idea of what would get me yelled at and how to avoid it.)
“What gets me is that people completely squander the potential of the Internet by building a unified identity on it. Like, you can do that in meat-space?“
To me, the potential of the Internet is a world where communication is text-based by default. Sure, I could build an identity in meatspace, but I’d have to communicate in voice all the time: always scrambling to keep up with the pace, no time or opportunity to correct “typos” (or to decide that the thing is better left entirely unsaid), often not even getting to speak at all because of meatspace’s utter lack of support for cross-posting (which means I have to either crowbar my way into the conversation by talking over people until they shut up (this rarely works), or (more likely) waiting for everyone else to spontaneously decide to stop talking so I can get a word in edgewise). (Apparently neurotypicals have some kind of Asking for a Turn to Speak ritual involving staring at the current speaker’s eyes, but I’ve never managed to find out the details.)
I’m also faceblind, which makes unification of meatspace identities a lot harder. I dislike the assumption that meatspace identities are naturally unified, because it leads to things like my former art teacher thinking he doesn’t have to introduce himself to me before trying to strike up a conversation at the park. (He does have to introduce himself, or else I’m going to give him the cold shoulder, as is customary for unaccompanied* adolescents approached by adult strangers. (Especially when the adolescent is female and the adult is male, but I come from a culture with very strong talking-to-strangers taboos such that that would be frowned upon regardless of the genders.)) People might wear several nametags on the Internet, but at least they don’t expect you to recognise them unprompted when they’re wearing a different nametag or none at all, and they don’t have to switch nametags when entering a new environment.
Hanging out with Australians is neat too, and something that’s often cited as being the potential of the Internet, but it’s more of a bonus to me.
*I was with my mother, but she was in the bathroom at the time.
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