I have to be honest: I had one of the most traumatizing experiences of my life yesterday. Right before lunch rolled around, I got a deluge of comments from random people that I didn’t know. Over the years, I’ve grown accustomed to having relatively anonymity on the web. I had a few blogs, and only a dozen or so of my friends were reading them (plus maybe a few random people, but that was it). So when I discovered through the flood of comments that my post had been linked off of some website for hackers, I was horrified. From what a couple of my friends have told me, the event I referred to in the title (henceforth referred to as “the S-word”) was probably on some guy’s Google Alerts thing, which alerted him to that post. He then proceeded to post it on that hacker site, and then people decided to post vicious comments on this blog and start a 100+ post thread discussing how wrong, incompetent, childish, etc. I am on that hacker news site. Personal attacks, from total strangers. So my knee-jerk reaction was to close this blog down. Or at least, install a plugin that requires login to view it.
I just can’t believe how seriously people are taking it, and how much they’re offended by it. Everything I say on this blog is not meant to be taken seriously. I mean, I talk about fruit tarts and video games, for crying out loud. And yet people started to pick apart what I was saying, twisting my words around, saying I said things I didn’t say, and then they even insulted me as a person! And they somehow twisted what I said about a fruit tart in a completely unrelated post into some kind of contradiction to what I said in the S-word post. It’s unbelievable, really. This whole thing was just venting my feelings, after an invitation for the S-word set me off. I wasn’t writing an essay for rhetoric class. It’s not an argument, and it’s certainly not meant to be logical at any level. They’re emotions. I’m an emotional person. It’s cathartic for me to vent. But apparently, some people took offense to it. I’ve never felt so hurt by people on the internet before.
I’m not going to argue here with what they said, even though a lot of them have the wrong idea about me, and they completely put words in my mouth. But since they grabbed things out of the air from the previous post, why would they listen to anything I say now? They’re still going to think I’m dumb or childish or whatever, and nothing I say will change that.
And if I were trying to make a real point, which I wasn’t, since it was just my feelings at the time, the comments and the hacker thread really kind of make it for me, don’t they?
I’m partly to blame for this. I didn’t notice that this blog had a setting called “I would like to block search engines” (which I now have turned on). Oh and I found a couple of tips from Google about how to stop them from indexing your site: here and here. I also mentioned the S-word, which I shouldn’t have. That apparently ticked off the guy enough that he actually went to the effort to post something on a hacker news site. I suppose he must also visit blogs of people whose political and religious preferences upset him, too, and then post them on websites of the opposing side just to incite some controversy. It just goes to show you that some people just love to be argumentative, and they also just surf the web all day, looking at blogs that get like 5 hits a day.