The only way to maintain any kind of sanity as a public figure is to actively avoid places where you and your work are being discussed. Human beings were not made for the volume of feedback the internet is capable of providing.
if anyone ever makes fun of me in a discord chat, please do not show it to me, I prefer to live in my bimbo bliss and I think it’s okay for people to not like me because I am annoying
I do not know why people think I need to know about the places where people are saying mean things about me. Do not make it harder for public figures to follow the one rule that will keep them normal!
I used to often be quite relieved when real life friends didn’t follow me on Twitter, or even when they unfollowed me but we remained good actual friends. They are just different realms, the real and the online.
I had a joke Twitter I explicitly used to follow Blaseball and other nonsense and make jokes and then somehow people found it and decided that was the one true representation of my personality. I would at least appreciate if people only follow accounts that I am choosing to share with them
I 100% understand this and support you, but also I think Zeynep Tufecki and Bret Stephens need to see exactly how much everyone thinks they suck so they pause from writing complete garbage month after month. Trying to square those two things..
Michael Michael, come down to the hate pit, people hate you there and it's gross and slimy, you'd love it, it's such a you place, it's uncertified data free and they screen for spreadsheets at the door come on.
When I ran for office I planned on avoiding the comments. A friend almost immediately sent me a screenshot of a comment on the first Stranger article about me, which he thought was supportive but I immediately clocked as a fat joke. Great start.
OMG 100%. I stopped looking at GoodReads like a week after my book came out and I've never been back. I read maybe three Amazon reviews. That information is not meant for me.
people will not only tear your work apart, they will also make up complete bullshit claims about it! total lies! they won't even ask you how you drew your conclusions, they'll just make shit up wholesale and everyone will just believe it! freeing yourself from caring is a CONSTANT battle!
I looked up conversations on Twitter about a software product i was working on once. It's a fairly obscure one, and even then I determined very quickly that looking at this unfiltered was an elaborate form of self-harm.
I'd imagine those are almost unhinged enough to be funny though. Turns out the only time anyone talks about a piece of software is when they either first try it and it's *extremely* good, or after they've had to use it for months and now hate it.
They have self interest in understanding the general sentiment, and of course they also go out on campaign. They should be able to insulate themselves from the firehose of hatred. Indeed from a policy perspective they should or they’ll be listening to 1% of the angriest least compromising voices.
The consequences aren’t someone with a Union Jack/rose in their bio telling them that they are shit and deserve to die. Because that sort of thing online is disconnected from the impact of their actions and I would argue makes them less likely to listen to other voices.
I do a lot of citizen participation work and the thing you notice when politicians are in those spaces is that they generally open up as soon as they see people are there for an exchange of views not a shouting match. Not all, but most.
I sometimes don't know how guests/panelists make it through events like Comic Con (and understand why some just avoid it).
Said the person going to BroadwayCon...
98% of the posters on that sub are normal, 1% have an inexplicable vendetta against Michael and Aubrey, and another 1% are people who have never heard of the podcast and just got randomly sent there by reddit because they were looking at dieting subs.
