How To Deal With Obnoxious Comments

When to defend yourself, and when to walk away

I’ve only been publishing on Medium for a couple months, and for the most part I’ve had a wonderful time. The majority of the other members are very active and encouraging, and their interaction with my work has been overwhelmingly positive.

However, the internet is the internet, and sooner or later you’re going to come across a person who seems dead set on misinterpreting everything you say. In this article, I will explore some tactics for dealing with hostile comments.

An Example

I recently had an article accepted with the Writing Cooperative which details how writers can pick up skills and additional income through transcribing. The article was based on a year of personal work experience. You can read it in full here:

You’ll notice as you read the article that it’s not an article about the profession of transcribing, but how writers can use transcribing to develop skills and pick up some extra income. Here’s a quote from the piece:

[T]ranscribing can provide you with effective, repetitive drills that help you achieve an instinctive mastery of the mechanical and physical elements of writing.

Again, the purpose here was not to write an end-all-be-all article about transcribing, but merely to point out how dabbling in transcribing can help writers.

The Comment

The article has performed pretty well over the last few weeks, though not as well as my article on content writing which you can read here:

As of this writing, the content writing article as 1.6k views and the transcribing article only has 156.

However, today I woke up to a comment from a woman who berated me for “not knowing anything about transcribing.”

Her Perspective

You can go to the article and read her comments and my responses yourself if you wish. My interpretation of the situation is that this is a case where she simply read something into the article that I didn’t put there.

She makes mention that she has “15 years” of experience transcribing, which is interesting. I have no problem conceding that a person with 15 years of experience in any occupation knows more about it than an individual who dabbled in that same occupation for a year. However, that doesn’t mean that the person who worked for a year does not have a right to compose an article about his or her own experiences.

For example, if a person wrote an article about his experience playing high school football for his senior year, he shouldn’t expect that a 10 year NFL professional should berate him and say “you know nothing about football.”

The article about the year of high school football is a potentially interesting story and the person has a right to share it.

How to Handle It

I did consider tagging that author in this article so that she might come here and comment as well. Cultivating engagement through controversy is often a useful tactic to getting more visibility for an article. However, I concluded that I would be better off, in this case, simply providing an assessment of the situation.

Perhaps the best thing you can do in most instance is simply not engage and mute or ignore the author of the comment.

I’m not sure what personal conflict it was that caused this reader to have such a hostile response to my article. I do write a lot of provocative content, but it kind of blindsided me that anyone would find the transcription article to be offensive.

The Psychology of Virtual Interactions

The fact is, as an author, you never know what kind of weird traumas or personal dissatisfaction in life you’re going to run into on the internet. Perhaps this person is mad at her boss, and when she saw the word “transcribing” in my title, she felt a subconscious entitlement to receive the 15 years worth of praise she’s been lacking in her professional life.

I don’t know.

All I know is that her comment comes across as unfounded, and it reflects poorly on her.

You’re Allowed to Write About Your Experiences

Human beings have a fundamental need to process their experiences. I fully admit that I pursued transcribing as a side gig to provide a supplementary income to finance my creative projects. That’s the article I wrote, and I’m allowed to reflect on it. Other authors might also be interested in writing related side hustles.

It’s bizarre to see an article on that topic, and express outrage that it doesn’t provide a complete picture about the occupation of transcribing. It was never meant to! The article is about something completely different!

It’s a weird thing to have people tell you “you know nothing” when you’re writing about a personal experience.

Another Odd Rejection

This scenario reminds me of another odd situation from years ago. I submitted a short story which took place on a beach in Seattle to a small literary publication. This publication had an evaluation process where 5 editors examined the piece, and if three of them agreed to take it, it would be published.

For my story, 2 editors liked the piece, 2 didn’t, and the third offered the objection:

“There is no beach in Seattle, this author clearly didn’t do his homework.”

The story was rejected, and under most circumstances I’m okay with that. Rejection is part of life and you just move on. But in this case it was irritating because it was a TRUE story and anyone with access to the internet can see that Seattle is on the coast and certainly has beaches!

It leaves you extremely frustrated when somebody offers a criticism that is based entirely only their own ignorance and incompetence.

Be Kind in Your Comments

One of the main problems with the internet is that people usually offer a comment based only on the title, or maybe the title and part of the first paragraph. This is especially easy to see on social media where you can deduce that people comment without a full comprehension of your position.

Everyone is in a hurry to offer their own opinion, but more people should be mindful of the words of Abraham Lincoln:

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.

Perhaps the best takeaway from this situation is just to resolve to be more mindful on a personal level. We cannot control the internet, and people will often misinterpret what you say and become offended. All we can do is resolve to be fair in our own comments, and take the time to actually try to understand what people are saying when they share articles about their personal experiences.

Here’s an article that further explains basic internet hostility: