In my TikTok video last year I mentioned a guy named Jake Novak who got harassed off the internet for the high crime of being kinda cringe. Well, on the one year anniversary of the TikTok that caused his life to implode, he's posted a joke TikTok as a sign of life.
And like... good for him. It's not that it's a happy ending, but the fact that he's still around and able to do comedy despite the entire internet going nuts and throwing death threats and vitriol at him for a month and a half over anodyne comedy songs is something, at least. Seeing someone get back up and dust themselves off after that kind thing is impressive, frankly.
didn't see anything about this when it happened, don't know anything about the person, never heard of them or the situation, etc. but i skimmed the video in question and it made me have some thoughts about online and the dogpile problem in general.
despite being in the (enviable?) position of having a youtube channel with virtually zero negative audience response to anything i upload, i still get affected by it, because (here's the thesis of this post up front) I think that for every deliberate "let's destroy this person" 4chan-style "raid," there are ten million completely inadvertent, unplanned, unstructured, and oblivious dogpiles comprised of thousands of independent actions, and it will eternally and forever be like this as long as there are comments sections.
if i make a minor mistake in a video, 500 people point it out. none of them checked to see if anyone else made that same comment. and it's not just the day after I post the video, or the week after. six months later, a year later, i get an email. i have a new comment. it's about the mistake i made a year ago.
you cannot head this off. nobody reads the description, on-screen text, subtitles, nothing. people don't even finish the video! people don't finish the video before commenting!!!!! so if you say anything that COULD be interpreted as wrong, even if you provide the necessary context thirty seconds later: congratulations! you just earned hundreds of comments from well-meaning folks who are not trying to be pricks.
that's the thing!! almost NOBODY who comments on my videos is TRYING to be a douchebag. they usually soft-peddle their correction, couch it in terms of "oh it's easy to not know this" or "i think you might have misinterpreted" - it's the gentlest possible way to be corrected. but i'm still being corrected. over and over. forever. on something that i already knew i'd gotten wrong before i even released the video, or maybe something that wasn't wrong at all if they had just watched a few more seconds.
the chilling effect from this is tremendous. i have backed off massively on what i'm willing to say in a video, and every single word I write or say goes through the same filter: "what will someone with absolutely no knowledge outside of their bedroom hear when I say this?" it massively constrains my creative potential, because before i can do any kind of experiment, i have to ask myself, "will this confuse people? will i get reviewbombed, effectively, by randos who watched this for 30 seconds, wrinkled their noses, and decided the right reaction was to do things that would make other people less likely to even try watching this, or anything else i make, by associating my name with a bunch of vitriol?"
i am having one of the nicest experiences anyone has ever had on youtube, and it still grinds me down. and what's fucked up is that even the positive responses grind me down.
i post a video about a weird laptop. 500 people reply "oh i had this machine, and [...]" followed by two paragraphs or sometimes a full page of text detailing their entire history with the device, where they got it and when, how they used it, who they gave it to when they were done with it. and i'm feeling so bad because i don't care, i couldn't care less. why would i care? why do they think i care?
well, that last one's really easy: because most people aren't media personalities. most people don't have many friends, if any at all, and they simply aren't used to having any outlet to talk about the things they want to talk about.
for the last 12-15 years of my life, I've had access to a social circle that was willing to listen to me talk about just about anything, and since I'm articulate, it doesn't even really matter if it's a shared interest; I can get people who know nothing about The Computer to listen to me talk about The Computer and feel satisfied.
most people don't have that! so if you bought an HP DV6000 in 2006, and you really liked it, and it had a weird feature, and then it died when it melted its own CPU off the motherboard, you've probably been walking around for 16 years with this story bumping around in your head and nobody to tell it to. you made a purchase! you want that choice validated! the strangeness of the device made you have Thoughts! you want your ability to Think to be admired and respected! thus, you jump at anything that looks like an outlet; it's human nature.
it never occurs to this notional person that you, The Creator, simply do not have or want to have these thoughts placed on your plate. so you have to feel permanently awkward, like you're giving a fake smile to a total stranger telling you a miserable family drama story at a party every single day, and this is the most positive possible outcome of putting yourself Out There online.
an enormous number of the people who "come together" to harass someone off the internet probably aren't aware of each other. they probably don't look at the other comments. it probably does not occur to them that the person they're saying bad things about is hearing them from thousands of other people, or that they're hearing them at all.
i cannot overstate this enough: PEOPLE DO NOT THINK THE OP EVER SEES THEIR COMMENTS. people think that comment sections are a conversation between other commenters at best. most of the time, they're just shouting into the void, and the idea that someone else will ever see what they wrote is immaterial if they even consider it at all. i cannot tell you how often i've replied to a somewhat shitty comment and had the commenter reply "oh my god i didn't think you'd see this i'm so sorry I wasn't even thinking, this was so rude of me."
vox populi; people want to speak, to satisfy the itch to exert control over their world. they don't really think, or care, about being heard. so i would guess that in a lot of cases where someone gets "mobbed" off the internet, the mob has no idea they're a mob. it's just 50,000 or 500,000 people who all independently think "lol, wowwwww. i'm gonna write 'damn this song makes me want to set this guys house on fire' because overreactions are funny." none of them have been taught how to put themselves in the shoes of a person receiving half a million overreactions.
i don't see any solution. it'll just be like this forever. lie bot voice no moral
footnote: "don't read the comments"? it is literally my job to read the comments. would you feel great if you complained about your boss and 50 people glibly told you to just "not go to work"? and what, are we going to bullshit each other about why we're here to begin with? most platforms have a "disable comments" option at this point, and you know exactly why almost nobody uses it. that shit's there for news orgs.
for everybody else, the comments are the point. interactions are the social currency of online; if you didn't want them, you wouldn't be posting. humans do not do shit without a return on investment, no matter how ephemeral.

