You know how the winter wind swirls dead leaves around until a dozen of them end up stuck in a corner by the fence? The Internet is like that. Late last year it swirled two big stories and an advice piece together, and they got stuck in my office. 🙂
The subject of this wedge of dead leaves is, loosely, bad reviews.
Or, you might also say, trolls.
I’m not talking about the supernatural beings in Germanic and Scandinavian folklore/mythology (think “Three Billy Goats Gruff”). No, I mean “a person who intentionally antagonizes others online by posting inflammatory, irrelevant, or offensive comments or other disruptive content,” according to Merriam-Webster Unabridged.
These people are often antisocial, psychopathic, sadistic. Bullies. (Though I am not discussing cyberbullying here, which is its own awful category of bad.)
But let’s go further. (And do note, if you go further, there will be strong and potentially offensive language in some of the extracts that follow.)
If you write books (or have a blog), you’ve probably had some criticism. Some bad reviews. Many bad reviews are just that—a negative review because the reader didn’t like your material. (We’ve talked about this before.) Your book (or blog post) just wasn’t for that person. And he or she is entitled to an opinion. I, for example, make no secret of my disdain for Ken Follett’s medieval historical novels, or Stephenie Meyers’s Twilight books, or E. L. James’s Shades of Grey series. But I only say those things here, in my own forum. And I’m reasonably sure these authors would all laugh at my sound and fury.
Some bad reviews, though, become personal attacks, as related by Kathleen Hale in “‘Am I being catfished?’ An author confronts her number one online critic” in the Guardian.
My mother sent me a link to a website called stopthegrbullies.com, or STGRB. Blythe appeared on a page called Badly Behaving Goodreaders, an allusion to Badly Behaving Authors. BBAs, Athena Parker, a co-founder of STGRB, told me, are “usually authors who [have] unknowingly broken some ‘rule’”. Once an author is labelled a BBA, his or her book is unofficially blacklisted by the book-blogging community.
In my case, I became a BBA by writing about issues such as PTSD, sex and deer hunting without moralising on these topics. (Other authors have become BBAs for: doing nothing, tweeting their dislike of snarky reviews, supporting other BBAs.)
“Blythe was involved in an [online] attack on a 14-year-old girl back in May 2012,” Parker said. The teenager had written a glowing review of a book Blythe hated, obliquely referencing Blythe’s hatred for it: “Dear Haters,” the review read. “Everyone has his or her own personal opinion, but expressing that through profanity is not the answer. Supposedly, this person is an English teacher at a middle school near where I lived… People can get hurt,” the review concluded.
In response, Blythe rallied her followers. Adults began flooding the girl’s thread,* saying, among other things, “Fuck you.”
Blythe, of course, is not this woman’s real name, and Internet anonymity contributes to the freedom of trolls to say pretty much anything they want with impunity. Freedom of speech and all that.
In “Why the Trolls Will Always Win,” an even longer piece in Wired, game developer Kathy Sierra relates her decade’s worth of online harassment.
I now believe the most dangerous time for a woman with online visibility is the point at which others are seen to be listening, “following”, “liking”, “favoriting”, retweeting. In other words, the point at which her readers have (in the troll’s mind) “drunk the Koolaid”. Apparently, that just can’t be allowed.
From the hater’s POV, you (the Koolaid server) do not “deserve” that attention. You are “stealing” an audience. From their angry, frustrated point of view, the idea that others listen to you is insanity. From their emotion-fueled view you don’t have readers you have cult followers. That just can’t be allowed.
You must be stopped. And if they cannot stop you, they can at least ruin your quality of life. A standard goal, in troll culture, I soon learned, is to cause “personal ruin”.
This article is shocking, really. You should read it. It will make you angry.
I’ve had a few experiences with trolls/haters, so I can really identify with both women’s urge to set the record straight with their critics. Hale says,
A standup comic can deal with a heckler in a crowded theatre, but online etiquette prohibits writers from responding to negativity in any way.
And for a woman who makes her living with words, this can be very frustrating.
The Internet itself contributes to the phenomenon. Material lives on it forever and goes viral overnight. Sierra notes,
Most of the master trolls weren’t active on Twitter in 2007. Today, they, along with their friends, fans, followers, and a zoo of anonymous sock puppet accounts are. The time from troll-has-an-idea to troll-mobilizes-brutal-assault has shrunk from weeks to minutes. Twitter, for all its good, is a hate amplifier.
These sorts of stories are enough for me to listen to the Irishman when he says, “Just delete it.” Honestly, I dither about it for a moment and then I move on. Life’s too short.
Goodreads, in fact, advises authors not to respond to negative reviews. And recently, novelist Chuck Wendig blogged about “Five Ways to Respond to a Negative Review: A Helpful Guide!” (It’s hilarious and so true.)
Do nothing, he says. But if you must do something,
Go punch a punching bag. Write in your bedside Twilight Sparkle diary. Go fire off an email to an author or artist friend and be all like AHHH DID YOU SEE THIS REVIEW (and if that author is truly a friend that author will say, yeah, yeah, that sucks, the reviewer sucks, but hey don’t get cuckoo bananapants, maybe go have a drink, go for a run, eat a cupcake, something, anything, calm thyself because this shit happens all the time).
He’s right. Because you don’t want to end up with a ruined quality of life, as Kathy Sierra notes. And if you do anything but hit delete, arguably, you have diminished your quality of life already. These people—and I’m not going to try to excuse them by calling them sad or suggesting that maybe they’ve had a hard life, though perhaps they have—love to get you wound up. Or they are truly deranged, in which case you really don’t want to engage.
It’s a crazy world. Stay safe. Don’t feed the trolls. Delete.
* In fact, I’d read of this attack on the young girl, which simply validated my long-ago decision to give Goodreads a pass. It’s like a pecking party over there.
Tweet: It’s a crazy world. Stay safe. Don’t feed the trolls. Delete.
Tweet: Bad reviews. Trolls. Sometimes they’re the same thing.
Tweet: Sometimes bad reviews become personal attacks. Ignore those. It’s not you, it’s him.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”