Sunday, April 14, 2013

Random thoughts about comment sections

I was re-reading old posts to send them to a friend and then I started to write a post about the one really nasty and "troll-y" comment I received before I disabled anonymous comments in the blog. However, I  decided not to write the post after all...

I had forgotten that back in February 2010,*  I had actually engaged in a few fruitless and nerve-racking interactions with "anonymous" in a subsequent blog post and its comment section and I don't want to comment on that because it was very foolish of my part to think that I could successfully argue with that unreasonable person (you can check the archives if you're curious, February 2010, starting on the "regret" post of the 8th).

Comment sections can lead to volatile reactions and petty fights, maybe the aforementioned interactions traumatized me a bit, so I generally don't comment back too much (in the comment section).

In any case, one thing is to disagree with someone and criticize them in a civil manner and it's another thing altogether to gratuitously distribute personal attacks and nasty words, particularly to someone who may be already fragile from a stressful and sad situation as mine was.

I think these thoughts from the draft of my post are good, though:


I hope I can learn a precious lesson from this and other nasty comments:

I hope I will never ever react in this extreme way and use my words to purposefully hurt a blogger or person who is sharing their views online, no matter how annoyed I am with them. I hope that comment can make me be a more compassionate and caring person towards the suffering of others.

I think it already has, because empathy is something I feel very strongly, almost physically.


Most importantly, I hope I can slowly become more thicker skinned and confident enough on my abilities in order not to let unfair and overly negative comments get to me too much.
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I'll be happy to remain a really "small" and irrelevant blogger if that guarantees that I get way less hate mail than famous bloggers out there! (and that does sound horribly selfish! Sigh...).

*right around the time my husband was ready to go on job interviews (and he had 4 interviews and 3 offers!)

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