#I’m sorry if it annoys you. my answer is always to curate your online experience.

[divorceblogger]

‘lowbrow literature’ has always been a thing and railing against it will not make people publish it any less

[nitewrighter]

Hiya, mun! So you don't really have to answer or post this, but when is it okay to start bullying someone on the internet? Or to start spewing vitriol at them? Or what missteps/misdeeds do they have to have made for people to say that its fine/justifiable to make fun of them? Sorry for the odd ask 😅

Oh like... when I say I’m “Bullying” Travis McElroy, I’m not trying to be actively malicious towards him, I mean it mostly in a, “I’m well aware he has much more of an online following than me and isn’t actually all that bad a guy, but I’m giving him shit because sometimes the content he puts out there, or its proliferation by his followers annoys me” but like... I don’t consider it particularly mean--it’s more like, “hey you’re being obnoxious, so here I am also being obnoxious with the assumption that you’re probably not going to see it and this is all operating under a context of internet comedy.” 

But I think in general, if you’re dealing with someone whose views or content really morally sits wrong with you, there’s a couple of approaches:

1. Mute/block them and their content-- Like, at the end of the day you curate your online experience, and you literally don’t have to see or interact with their shit. There is no obligation there. This is the quickest and easiest approach and 9/10 is better for everyone’s mental health and energy in the long run. Not every fight has to be your fight, not every bit of horrible jackshit out there needs a response--mute and move on. Like, I have a handful of relatively popular posts floating out there, but if I see terfs showing up in the notes, I just start blocking the shit out of them--and it’s pretty easy because they’re always reblogging shit in circles, so all it takes is one idiot with a URL like “My-uterus-and-hatred-are-my-entire-personality” to unveil the whole infestation, and I block the shit out of everyone who reblogs from them. I do not need their hateful shit anywhere near me or my followers and I’m not going to give them a platform by engaging with them. 

2.  If necessary, maybe talk (civilly!!) to your mutuals if they’re sharing content from that person about the issues you have with them, and work something out so that they make a tag for that content that you can block, or that they recognize, “Oh that person did a fucked up thing” and block that person as well. Again, this is another approach that doesn’t require actually confronting the offender and doesn’t require a lot of energy and is ultimately more about curating your own online experience.

3. Okay so here’s where we start talking about confrontation and like... the thing about the internet is that shit can get messy fast. Lives can get ruined fast. If this were 2013, maybe I could say that you can try to approach someone in good faith, discuss your differences of belief, but unfortunately you’re talking to post-2020 Sarah who is in 24/7 “STAY BACK I WILL CUT YOU” mode due to the whole... *gestures vaguely at the pandemic and attempted coup and blatant fascism in right-wing circles* ...y’know. But if you think it’s possible to engage with someone in good faith...if you know them to generally be a good and reasonable person, it can be worth talking shit out with them. Civility can be much more effective in getting people to listen than we think. But at the end of the day, listen to your gut. People are dangerous out there.

Honestly a big savior to my mental health has been the acknowledgement that, in the grand scale of the internet, de-platforming can be so much more powerful than outright confrontation and a lot of the time it’s better because there is no good-faith discussion with a lot of the assholes out there and all debating with them is going to do is wear you out because a lot of these people made their choices about who they are a long time ago, and then barred the gates to their brains--any new information that brings their years-long beliefs or tastes into question is ‘fake news’ or ‘cancel culture’ or ‘rampant political correctness.’ They will come up with as many words as they need to rationalize, “I don’t believe that because it makes me uncomfortable.” So like...essentially what I’m saying is, is that a lot of the time, all internet bullying does is make people stick to their corners harder. How many memes have we reblogged about “Doing the thing out of spite?” That’s... pretty much how polarized shit has gotten. 

So like... man, I won’t say there isn’t a lot of rage in me, because there is, but you have to be very discerning when and where you’re going to throw that molotov, and like they say in The Good Place, when you throw a molotov, all your problems become different problems. So I don’t believe in anon hate, and I don’t think dogpiling helps either (and a lot of the time I think dogpiling comes from people not being aware that they’re dogpiling, like the 9000 people on that one aliens post I made that are all miraculously completely unaware that 8999 people before them have all added on the text addition of “wHAt iF thE aLienS CamE aS dOgs?” Reading comprehension on the internet is shit, just something to keep in mind. This is just text on a screen for a lot of people and they don’t recognize the scale of ‘9000 notes’ on a post. There is a lot of anger in me, but..I need to be very sure I’m not making the situation worse by lobbing that anger out into cyberspace. 

[fille-lioncelle]

when i read stuff like what you wrote answering your last ask i feel really sad and disappointed because that's the kind of content i'd have loved to come out of the remakes instead of the yo mama jokes between fandoms

Aw, anon, I’m sorry that you’re sad! I haven’t seen any yo mama jokes between fandoms tbh, but I have occasionally glimpsed some pettiness when I ventured into various tags, looking for cute gifsets to reblog haha.

I never see it on my dash though. I think it comes down to just following people who do fandom the way you want to do it and just curate your own online experience that way. It can be hard! But it tends to work. Or you just pick one friend and annoy them with remake thoughts.

Or you come talk to me! :D I’m always open for a chat!

- H