Is posting writing on the internet worth it?

(ARGH I SWEAR TO GOD I TRIED TO PUT THIS IN THE RIGHT FORUM THIS TIME, SORRY!)

There was a great article linked by Rock, Paper, Shotgun today. It's an article by a woman who wrote some blog posts about videogames a couple years ago but then completely stopped. She posted about why she stopped last month.

blog.lauramichet.com/2014/07/11/why-i-st...nternet-for-a-while/

It's a good post, but the most pertinent part is this: "Over time, I have gradually regained the desire to write on the internet, but not in the way I used to. I no longer go around ranching and slaughtering sacred cows. It’s not that I don’t have opinions anymore; it’s that I no longer feel the internet is the best place to share all of them. I admire and respect people who put up with the audience’s bullshit, but during my hiatus, I felt like the problem at hand was so big, cruel, sexist, and messed-up that breaking myself against it wasn’t productive. I could do better for myself in environments where people didn’t call me a cunt all the time. I only have so much time to live my life, and I’d rather spend it making cool things for kind and grateful people."

I have pretty much begun to believe the same thing. It's not a big deal because I never put things out there on a blog to begin with, but that was primarily because I don't feel I am terribly talented in talking about my hobby (that's not to say I suck at everything, I'm pretty good at my job and whatnot). But philosophically, even if I had something to say, I don't think it's worth trying to write on the internet about anything really interesting---all you get in return is, best case scenario, trolling, worst case scenario endless streams of hateful abuse and threats. There isn't a big enough positive payoff to writing to a large, uncontrolled internet audience about anything even slightly critical or controversial to make it worth it.

Since a fair number of you post for a general audience, I am curious to hear what everyone else thinks. I know one answer is "grow a thicker skin" or whatever. But to me that's just another version of the thing that tells a woman who is threatened with rape and death for writing something super innocuous that they should just ignore it. Moreover, I wonder what it means for the future of blogs and general internet content that the tone is so hateful and it has become much more attractive to stop writing to a general audience.

More of a conversation starter than anything else, but I guess I'm just so depressed about what virtual anonymity provided by the internet reveals about the median individual that it's on my mind right now. It has really ground me down over the past few years.

The internet is full of ignorance and assholes. Nothing you write will change that. The sooner you accept its not worth your time the happier you'll be. That's my philosophy anyways.

More like Gary Sux.

Writing is mostly a selfish thing. You have this cool idea, and a cool way to express it, so you decide to put it out there. If people like it, you think, "hey, that's cool, this guy also knows what he's talking about." If not well, you tend to drone out the critics. Trolls show up more when you talk poorly about something they like, because they often want to just find someone else who shares their positive experience. They want to see someone else say the same thing in a different way. I'd love to see a comparative analysis of the number of thumbs that positive reviews versus negative reviews get on BGG, although I think I already know the answer.

If the writing is no longer fun for you, then you stop doing it.

I think the internet is great for people with outgoing personalities and positive attitudes, like Tom Vasel, Wil Wheaton, and SU&SD. But if you want potentially negative critical discussion, it won't work as well most of the time. When Colby interviewed me for the plaid hat podcast, he asks me about World of Warcraft, which I had formerly played quite a bit, and I did not speak highly of it. There was a very irate poster on the PHG forums pretty quickly.

There's also almost no barrier to entry to writing stuff on the internet, so it's easy to do. But it's just as easy for people to come poop on your doorstep.

Just because blogs can have comments doesn't mean they should. If someone wants to respond to a blog, let them write their own blog.

It surprises me how many people think this verbal abuse is a result of the internet age. I guarantee you that yahoos have been screaming inanities at newspaper articles for centuries. They just said it out loud to whomever was unlucky enough to be in the same room. If they really wanted to be heard, they had to take time to write to the editor, and that editor would decide if the response was worth printing. The internet isn't the problem, the lack of a filter is.

Gregarius wrote: The internet isn't the problem, the lack of a filter is.

In her case, I'd say that gamers are the problem - they're possibly the most insecure, reactionary, provincial and sexist subspecies of dimwits on the internet, which is no ordinary feat. Go to any mainline video game site and fish around in the comments; gamers are desperate to seize upon any perceived slight against something they hold dear, at which point they'll descend to astounding depths to "defend" something that wasn't really being attacked in the first place. Sounds like that's what happened to her. As for Gary Sax's concerns about putting things out there and receiving trolling or threats in return, I'd say it varies site-by-site and is largely dependent on the audience. Sites like A.V. Club, The Atlantic Wire et. al. have a pretty high standard of discourse, even when their writers drop "hot takes." I've had pretty good luck with the places I've had articles or essays posted, and a lot of that was by design; a thinkpiece on misogyny and homophobia in video games isn't going to be welcomed or appreciated at a site like IGN, which is a petri dish.[video] gamers are the problem - they're possibly the most insecure, reactionary, provincial and sexist subspecies of dimwits on the internet, which is no ordinary feat. Go to any mainline video game site and fish around in the comments; gamers are desperate to seize upon any perceived slight against something they hold dear, at which point they'll descend to astounding depths to "defend" something that wasn't really being attacked in the first place. Sounds like that's what happened to her.

As for Gary Sax's concerns about putting things out there and receiving trolling or threats in return, I'd say it varies site-by-site and is largely dependent on the audience. Sites like A.V. Club, The Atlantic Wire et. al. have a pretty high standard of discourse, even when their writers drop "hot takes." I've had pretty good luck with the places I've had articles or essays posted, and a lot of that was by design; a thinkpiece on misogyny and homophobia in video games isn't going to be welcomed or appreciated at a site like IGN, which is a petri dish.

Yeah I will read her article but I've had similar feelings, at least, not about woe is me, more just about fuck, it write for yourself, because you're interested in it and writing it is interesting to you. Just disable comments. No, seriously, if I ever get round to it, that's what I will do. It felt a lot better on BGG just to stop subscribing to everything you post because its not worth the amount of ginormous assholery that follows every single post trying to be a discussion. Hey, I've not exactly been a saint myself, so I know what I'm talking about. Yeah, you can call me the C word if you want. On the other hand, there are people out there who can give another viewpoint, reinforce your own, or make you rethink it, or totally blow it out of the water, thats what sites like this tend to do, and the chat leagues on BGG (seriously, basically just very condensed mini websites on their own) try to do. But don't let the bastards grind you down, just do whatever YOU want and set things up to involve or not involve "the innernetz" as you see fit

or, basically, in a much more fucking blathering way, what Mad Dog said.

My blog turned 12 a couple weeks ago, but I've been writing online since the early 80s, starting on BBSes, then Usenet, then online forums and blogs. It's always been a great outlet for me.

When I first started blogging, the software I was using didn't have a comments feature. I later switched to Wordpress and had comments for a while, but a few years ago I decided to turn them off, and I've never reconsidered that. I didn't get that many -- it's not like I have thousands of readers -- but even the small number I got included trolls and people whose opinions I didn't think added anything. There was no point to a "discussion"; I was just posting what was on my mind.

On the flip side, I don't do comments on blogs either. About the only place I really follow comments is MetaFilter, which is (usually) a cut above the usual. Even blogs I really like and read faithfully I don't wander into the comments.

Of course it's nice when someone likes something I've written, and I do occasionally look at my site's hits and stuff, but it really is, for me, just a way to get things off my chest, and it's not really too necessary for there to even be an audience for most of it.

I did NaNoWriMo several years ago and wrote a terrible "novel" that I've never looked at since. A couple years later I got an idea for another novel, but I didn't get very far with it. I realize that I don't have much to say that anyone needs to hear. There's no novel in me that the world is lesser for not having. That's okay.

So I just do my thing on my blog and wherever, and I don't worry too much about how or if it's received. That's also why I love Twitter the most out of all the social media; it's fire-and-forget, and perfect for just throwing things out there as they pop into your head.

Is it worth it

That depends entirely on whether you or your readers enjoy either reading, or you writing.

I do enjoy the words of many of the writers on this site and others. If internet writers packed up shop it would be rubbish.

So imo, it is worth it, for me as a reader.

I don't write a whole lot, but do a bit. I never looked at it (mainly because i don't have thick skin), but a friend of mine told me that my blog post here on Castles of Burgundy got reposted to reddit boardgames to a hail of abuse. I have also stopped doing reviews (i only did a few) on BGG because i generally found that outside of more niche war games, if i critised a game I got a slew of comments explaining how I was inept or wrong in one way or another.

The thing is, a lot of people don't understand that it is an opinion. Nothing more. If i write an opinion, I don't expect or demand that everyone agree with it. I'm not telling people the factual truth, or what they should think, but for whatever reason normal people see it like that. My friends that are into gaming, some of them do see it like that. They aren't stupid, but for some reason they take reviews of games they like personally.

At any rate, I continue to write occasional pieces because i enjoy it, and it satisfies my ego. If that changes, i'd stop.

themoth.org/posts/stories/talking-to-my-...-in-the-internet-age

The Internet Hates Women.

Not in a small way, in a big way. Women's opinions are routinely drowned out in a sea of namecalling and worse. Thick sink is nice and all, but the Internet's anonymity is poisonous to discourse. To my thinking, the most salient point above is there is no filter and at the same time, there are no consequences for being awful. It's not a good situation.

To your thoughts--are opinions in general drowned out on the Internet? Yeah, sure. It's huge. I have all kinds of clever shit to say, but only the 12 actual humans on my Twitter followers list will ever know them. C-beams, Tannhauser, tears, rain. It's no biggie. Sometimes I get noticed, but it's not really in me to work/want more from this. Kudos to those who do, it's hard work.

jeb wrote: The Internet Hates Women.

Not in a small way, in a big way. Women's opinions are routinely drowned out in a sea of namecalling and worse. Thick sink is nice and all, but the Internet's anonymity is poisonous to discourse. To my thinking, the most salient point above is there is no filter and at the same time, there are no consequences for being awful. It's not a good situation.

This is the scariest shit and completely right on. If there are (and have always been) so many people who hate women this much... I don't get how they can live with something that they hate so much and think is worthless, presuming the overwhelming majority of these people are straight.

Thanks for the responses, everyone. I know it has always been this way, it has just been bugging me recently.

Gary Sax wrote: But philosophically, even if I had something to say, I don't think it's worth trying to write on the internet about anything really interesting---all you get in return is, best case scenario, trolling, worst case scenario endless streams of hateful abuse and threats.

I think you are too much of a pessimist. I've had 90% positive feedback and 10% asshattery, 99.9% of which was at BGG. So, I think venue is the most important factor in what you receive.

There isn't a big enough positive payoff to writing to a large, uncontrolled internet audience about anything even slightly critical or controversial to make it worth it.

My philosophy is that life is about making the lives of others better, sort of a riff on the old "leave your campsite cleaner than when you found it", so for me, I feel obligated to help people in my daily life, which extends to the internet and my hobby. I write for me, as a creative outlet, but I also write my reviews because as far as I know, nobody really does what I do and how I do it: take a bunch of mostly non-gamers, stick a game they've never heard of in front of them, and play it a bunch of times, polling them each time to see if they liked it or not. So, that's my "schtick", so to speak, and I do it as a sort of PSA so that people don't piss money away on shit, or help them make a decision on what to buy. I find that if you look at things from a philanthropic perspective, what you get in return is irrelevant since some people will see what you've written, not comment on it, and you get the knowledge that someone, somewhere, was helped by what you did.

It's a shitload of work keeping up a website and/or blog though. The #1 complaint I've gotten over the years is that I don't write enough.

Since a fair number of you post for a general audience, I am curious to hear what everyone else thinks. I know one answer is "grow a thicker skin" or whatever. But to me that's just another version of the thing that tells a woman who is threatened with rape and death for writing something super innocuous that they should just ignore it.

I think it's not about thick skin, it's about doing it for yourself. If you don't want to write for the joy of writing, or for philanthropic reasons, then you're doing it wrong. People can be assholes, for sure, but the venue matters. If you post something here, you'll be met with virtual high-fives. If you write at BGG, well, then it's very touchy. You can really get shit on by entitled smegma-gobblers there who feel that because you wrote something, you are obligated to have it mirror their own views. So, it's about where as much as what you write.

Moreover, I wonder what it means for the future of blogs and general internet content that the tone is so hateful and it has become much more attractive to stop writing to a general audience.

Go to any given Facebook news story and you'll see the most vile shit ever. Stuff that makes me look like a sterling example of humanity. People mostly suck, and the internet has created this matrix where anonymity and unsolicited opinion meet, and people who are naturally a little bit asshole become the Sagitarrius A* of assholes because there's no possible recourse for the entity they attacked.

More of a conversation starter than anything else, but I guess I'm just so depressed about what virtual anonymity provided by the internet reveals about the median individual that it's on my mind right now. It has really ground me down over the past few years.

Not everyone is like that. Many are, and they're the ones who you remember. Think about this: For every "black kid killed by white cop" story, there's 1,000 "cop saves woman from being raped" or "firefighter risks life to save family pet" story that goes unreported. It's as if the media is actively attempting to make the world a more negative place, and it appears to be working. Don't let it work on you, and you win at life. Write, if you feel the desire to write, and fuck the haters. Until you charge them to read your stuff, you've got no obligation to them.

Gregarius wrote: The internet isn't the problem, the lack of a filter is.

I think there should really be a discussion about how to improve civility standards on gaming sites and moderation policies should be tightened a fair bit.

For example, should comments like this should be allowed?

Asshole on linked blog wrote: So some meanies online called you a name and it hurt your feels so much you went back to their message board to read them call you names some more, and then you went and hid offline and still can’t get over it?

Congrats?

I don't think so. But this kind of nastiness can be found on most gaming sites and not flagged by moderators. A friend of mine, who is a big cynic, claims it's because comment sections drive a significant amount of traffic but I simply think most sites feel that restricting comments would damage good discussions, would be looked down by the public and end up doing more harm that good.

I believe in the littering principle. If a street is clean the chances of someone throwing garbage are smaller than if the street is already full of it. And if nasty comments are common, more people will be driven to "witty" retorts and name-calling. Or simply driven not to post, so the bar becomes even lower as only trolls bother to.

And yes, this is significantly worse for women. It's incredibly pathethic that a woman I follow has an average of 12 people in her Twitch channel and she already has to give three or four people moderator powers to ban all the guys who ask to see her tits.

Erik Twice wrote: And yes, this is significantly worse for women. It's incredibly pathethic that a woman I follow has an average of 12 people in her Twitch channel and she already has to give three or four people moderator powers to ban all the guys who ask to see her tits.

Twitch is a neat service, but its chat is pretty damn repulsive. Luckily you can go full-screen.

I have been struggling with this a lot recently. I'm not completely sure if its shown up in my writing or not, but I do feel like the actual process of getting something down isn't nearly as easy as it once was. I think a big part of it is that because my own experience in the hobby has drifted from the main narrative over on BGG (and to a far lesser extent here). The result is that now and then I get weird pushback against stuff that I thought was completely benign.

For example, someone posted my "Boardgaming's Vanishing History" article to /r/boardgames, and a large percentage of the comments were people proclaiming rather angrily that 1) I was being a drama queen and 2) it wasn't a problem in the first place. I wasn't hurt by it or anything, but I was frankly baffled by the response.

It's little stuff like that that burns me out completely on writing at all, but like Legomancer I just find it therapeutic sometimes. It's definitely true that writing is a selfish act. A lot of times I'm just writing something that I would like to read or feel compelled to write, and I'm not really very concerned about how interesting it is to everyone else. In my experience that's how almost all writing is. That's not a bad thing, but it does give me a different perspective when I'm writing something for an audience. The only person I'm really interested in pleasing is myself.

Of course this is all kind of a trite discourse when comparing to the larger issue of sexism, general nastiness, and ridiculous sensitivity on the internet. I actually think that a lot of people have a list next to their computer, one that contains a series of subjects that they have vowed they will comment on, regardless of how touchy, stupid, or awful it makes them look.

R/boardgames is full of imbeciles that cannot read. My experience of the channel is the folks there spend less time reading than they do typing their responses to things. With introspective articles, particularly like your recent ones, you have to look at it as something personal to the individual, and only then can you see the worth in it. Rather impersonal flame channels like R/boardgames tend to mis such things.