Anonymous User asked: i used to send a lot of those types of vent anons when i was younger, and while i cant speak for everyone i do have an idea why that sort of thing happens? im trying to figure out how to say this concisely (i extremely dont want to send a multi-part ask lol) but this really feels like a disconnect between people who have An Audience and people who dont. and thats not the whole story, but you ask what the benefit is of sending that kind of thing to someone vs just posting it to your blog and like... at the time i was doing this, i did post things like that to my blog sometimes, and it would either go totally ignored or at most maybe get one or two likes? but sending an ask to someone would often get a personal response, sometimes also further responses from their followers. maybe they dont solve the problem but it feels a little less like being trapped in a void. and its hard to put yourself on the other side of this when you just dont get anons, weird or otherwise. tbh even now i feel like i cant really judge for sure if everything ive said here is okay... like i think it is but i just cant know
I think you've hit the nail on the head. A lot of the differences in what is considered normal and appropriate social media behavior I really do think comes down to whether you have ever had a lot of social media followers or not. Cohost doesn't have Number but I was still one of the first 100 users and my posts get a lot of attention. And I've previously had 3000+ followers on twitter etc. for many years. So my experience of Social Media Interactions From Strangers is just very different than people who have only ever been the follower.
If just the one person over shared in my notifications that's one thing, but it happens very frequently and has been happening for years and my empathy around it is just eroded. I can't even count the number of times someone has just randomly DM'd me or sent an ask or reply stating that they are imminently going to kill themself. You can't just continuously receive that shit with absolutely no idea how real it is or serious they are and continue to allow yourself to be emotionally invested in every single stranger who says words at you. So instead it just becomes really infuriating.
I experience it as someone emailing those words directly to me. I experience it as someone walking up to me on the street or at the park and just like, not letting me exist in public.
And yeah I lose the distinction between the "I'm going to kill myself because of your post about COVID precautions" and the "Wow you feel happy for a single fucking moment? Wish that me." They both suck.
I simply can't have this shit put on me. It's not appropriate pro-social behavior. It's rancid and shitty and people shouldn't do that to strangers. It sucks for you if yo don't have anyone to talk to about your problems, but that to be quite honest, cannot be the problem of any random person online who you decide to make it their problem. They didn't sign up for that and are not in a position to honestly do anything productive about it either. You don't know what's really going on in their life, or what their life has been, or anything. You only know what you see on social media, which the more follows you have, becomes less and less accurately reflective of your total life experience (and also, the older you get, such that there is far too much life for me to share it all publicly all the time to everyone in every post.)