One of my very favourite bloggers, Amanda B., has packed it in.
Her blog had become more and more popular over the past year or two, and with that came the inevitable trolls and assholes who write hateful, vicious, hurtful comments and e-mails. Finally, a line was crossed and she decided that the personal attacks and vitriol weren't balanced off by the pleasure that she got from writing to a large and mostly very supportive readership, and she signed off for good.
It pisses me off. I hate when the bad guys win.
I know I'm lucky - kinda. Not many people read this blog, and far fewer de-lurk to comment on it, and rarely is anyone anything other than sweet, funny, and smart. This isn't a "popular" blog, outside the few friends who drop by.
There are a lot of blogs out there, many of them very popular, but if you ask me, not all the high-traffic blogs deserve their popularity. I read blogs where the writer says something like, "Today I burped. It felt really awesome. Do you like to burp?" and they get 130 comments about belching, all of them telling the blogger that his or her belches sound like a symphony and probably smell like roses and that this was the funniest burping story they've ever read, ever, and they declare they spit coke all over the screen when they read the thing about the burping.
If the proportions on my blog stats hold for the internet, that means thousands of people stop by that blog every day to see the latest banal, borrowed wisdom belched out by an indifferent writer in ungrammatical prose punctuated poorly and rife with grotesque misspellings and bizarre malapropisms. Thousands. Every day.
I used to get bitter about that, want to throw up my hands and say "How does this idiot get hundreds or thousands of visitors every day when some of the brilliant - truly brilliant - blogs to be found on the left hand column of this page seem to be read by me and the same people who drop by my place, and that's about it?" A quality readership,to be sure, but not the huge numbers, and it doesn't make a lick of sense to me.
But some A-list blogs - say, Amanda's or Dooce - really do deserve high traffic. But with high traffic comes the trolls and assholes. So it's a mixed blessing.
I've seen it before - we all have: commenters who have nothing in mind but sneering and denigrating their betters have hurt our friends and fellow bloggers. And so very many times the reaction from the blogger who is injured can be paraphrased: "Someone I know said something really cruel to me." or "Someone is sending me repeatedly, deliberately cruel criticisms" ... and it's followed by " ... so I really think I'll stop now." They never reveal the who or the what, just vague talk about hurt and viciousness by unknown assailants.
It infuriates me, absolutely makes me livid. Because i hate when the assholes and haters prevail not because we don't have the wherewithal to fight them but because - in the name of class or good breeding or not sinking to their level - we simply surrender.
I don't mean this to sound like a criticism of Amanda's choice to stop blogging. She takes that decision for her own reasons, and I know her to be a strong, sensitive, smart and funny human being and all I want is for my friends to be happy and if this makes her happy, so be it.
And I get that she doesn't want to leap into a pissing match with a skunk, doesn't want to have her life or her blog devolve into a place where the negative feelings outweigh the positive. I get that she had a place that she loved, and that some vandals came in and made a mess and walked off and now it doesn't feel right for her any more.
But I don't get why those of us who also loved the place have it yanked away from us and have nowhere to release our anger and disgust.
When Dooce had a particularly cruel, particularly vicious email, she did something I really admired. She put the offending e-mail up on her blog, complete with the moron's address, did a bit of research to find out who the person was behind it - and the adoring internets banded together to carve one poor idiot named Matt Jackson a whole new asshole - or a whole new Matt, same thing.
Now that? THAT is satisfying.
We've all seen them: people who can't create, so they fill the gaping maw in their soul by trying to tear down what others create. They can't approach the goodness and kindness of other people, so the compensate by ripping at the flesh of their betters. They can't add anything to life, so they focus on sucking life away from others.
They're terrorists of a different kind - intellectual, emotional, spiritual terrorists. And it makes me sad to see they won another round, when so many of us would have stood behind Amanda and - using every ounce of our creativity and ingenuity - made life exceedingly miserable for someone who launched an undeserved, unprovoked attack on our friend. And that's not being negative or poisonous - protecting our friends and family makes us better people, in my book.
I'll miss Amanda's blog for its expression of her wit and charm, her unique observations, her courage and her warm, human spirit. Something good is gone, and all we can do is look around and wonder who the nameless and faceless terrorists will pick next.
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