Hate-reading For Fun And Profit
Is it really worth reading something that’s going to make you mad?
Hate-reading: the act of reading something for the purpose of expressing your disagreement or disdain of it.
The highest read rate I’ve ever gotten was for a story about how I don’t particularly like New York City. It’s kept a pretty steady 93% ever since it was published in April. In contrast, the story I wrote and published at the same time about being in a threesome with two men only has a 55% read rate. I find this incredibly peculiar, but apparently prurient interest is not as powerful as the desire to hate-read. Some people are just drawn like a moth to the flame by topics they don’t like or agree with. And then once read, a similar article will come up in their feed the next day, leading them to do it some more.
I don’t do much hate-reading myself. I used to check out a fair number of articles about Jordan Peterson, just because I was trying to understand what the appeal was. But now that I feel like I have a handle on that, I rarely read about him. Even so, my comments were typically less about expressing disagreement than they were about pointing out the glaring holes in some of his theories. After all, we haven’t shared a common ancestor with lobsters for 70 million years. And I don’t have to go to the work of crafting an actual rebuttal when all I have to do is say, “He’s contradicting what he’s already said about this here, and then posting a quote.”
Today I read two comments on an article written by a popular Medium writer who often talks about politics and the decline of American society. I find him to be pretty spot on — he writes a lot about the dominance hierarchy/social Darwinism aspect of our culture and how that is destructive; something that resonates for me quite a bit. And, I get that other people might have another perspective, but when I see comments like these, I just have to laugh:
Almost the same exact article posted twice today by the author. This isn’t out of the ordinary either. Medium, Medium Staff, we need answers or some type of proof this is all really coming from one person. Also, can some ground rules be set that people cannot make money by posting almost the same thing over and over and over? This particular writer lives to tell us how horrible capitalism is, but all of his articles are on paywall. Hm.
And this one too:
This is a good point. He has a substantial following as well on here. I do seem to find a lot of inaccuracy and hypocrisy in his articles. I wonder if it is due to how much he is publishing on here. In either case there definitely is a narrow minded view portrayed across the board in each piece.
In other words, no actual rebuttal; no tangibles other than that he writes a lot about the same theme (so do I, for that matter); and an apparent jealousy that this guy has a large following and is making money. Look up hate-reading in the dictionary and you might just see a photo of these two guys. They seemed to both be oblivious to the fact that by continuing to read and comment on his writing, they were contributing to this writer’s continued success and adding to his bottom line. They think they are looking smart at someone else’s expense, but they just look petty. And the one who is making the profit is still the writer.
The kinds of lame, toothless comments like the ones above just really come across as desperate. What they convey is, “I don’t like what he’s saying here. I can’t really articulate why, so instead, I’ll call him inaccurate (with no citations as to specifics) and go tell the teacher that he’s making too much money and getting too much attention writing things that make me feel bad about myself.” It’s like the grown-up version of “I know you are, but what am I?”
C’mon guys — don’t you have something better to do than this? I mean really….
