The Digital Wasteland

Why are some readers so hostile?

Sometimes the internet makes you shake your head and wonder. What drives all the misplaced hostility? What compels people to write aggressive and embarrassing comments that a two-second Google search could disprove?

Is everyone on the internet going through a bitter divorce? Have they all just lost their jobs? Why is everyone so angry?

Yesterday I had not one but two mini battles of the sort that I thought I’d escaped forever when I gave up Facebook. Yet, here those people are again, crawling out of the woodwork to provoke and run, content that they have left the world just a little bit worse off than it was before they acted.

Articles about making money writing

I am the first to admit that there are too many articles about how much money you can make writing online. I also confess that I’ve contributed my share of these articles. My only justification is that I feel my articles are grounded in reality.

I’ve worked as a writer for 20 years, and I’ve figured out a variety of ways to make money at it. However, I’m the first to admit that oftentimes, you can’t do better than a slave wage working as a writer. The baseline I like to use to judge whether a pursuit is worth it or not, is whether or not I can make a thousand dollars in a month.

A thousand dollars isn’t enough to live on, but it’s a start. I wrote an article detailing 5 ways that I’ve made a thousand dollars in a month while writing. The article was accepted by The Writing Cooperative, which is one of the larger publications on Medium. You can read it here and judge its quality for yourself:

The comment

Today I received a notification of a new comment on that article. Here it is:

Now, I can more or less understand the writer’s frustration. There are a lot of absurd articles out there that promise secret tricks that will unlock tens of thousands of dollars a month. However, my article is not of that variety.

I couldn’t help but speculate on what type of person I might be dealing with. My writing experience is easy to validate. Here’s my Amazon author page, and here’s an article about a recent library presentation. Sure, I’m no JK Rowling, but it’s not hard to stumble across the bread crumbs that indicate I do have some writing experience.

Are they even people?

I’ve had a few articles trend over the last few months, and the same thing always happens. The greater the reach of your writing, the weirder the comments you start to receive. My most lucrative article on Medium is an anti-Trump political rant:

Now, when you write political commentary, you’re asking for a fight. I understand that. I’ve gone through and blocked the authors of the most bizarre comments that I received on that article, but you might still be able to read them.

Political discourse is always dirty. Half the time I think comments are written by bots that just want to bog you down so you don’t have time to write anything else. It seems utterly bizarre that somewhere, somehow, somebody perceives there is a benefit to creating an artificial means of an eternal argument.

That’s just speculation on my part, I suppose it’s more terrifying to presume those comments were actually authored by living, breathing human beings.

Block and carry on

The older I get, the less inclined I am to engage with this kind of thing. In my youth, I used to worry that blocking people would put me in an echo chamber. That’s a real fear, but only if you’re in a sincere environment. The reality of the internet is that many of the people you interact with are motivated by something other than a genuine inclination to share ideas.

For my part, I try to be truthful in the things that I write. I make an effort to provide valuable, actionable information. Ultimately, I’m too lazy to do any research, so everything I write about is something I’ve experienced personally.

Despite the comments I get, I am still happy to answer sincere questions and provide what guidance I can. If you still don’t think I have any writing experience, then I invite you to look into it yourself. It’s amazing how effective independent verification can be in helping a person get a better handle on reality.

P.S. I was tempted to tag Conny in this article to see how she would respond, but I decided against it.

Here’s another of my literary type stories: