Yesterday I posted the outfit I was wearing, and described it as “how to dress femininely while still looking like a computer scientist”. And I fully expected to receive several angry asks or notes being like “there is no dress code for being a computer scientist! normal-looking girls with normal-looking clothes and makeup can be computer scientists too!” And I had a whole response prepared in my head (it was about semiotics).
But nobody sent me angry asks or notes. I received some likes and compliments, and that was it.
In general, this happens to me all the time. I’ll post something potentially controversial (such as this post), and I’ll sit there at my computer cringing, waiting for the anon hate to come pouring in.
But that never happens. I pretty much never receive negative responses to any of my posts.
So where does this intuition come from, that I need to be careful what I post or I’m going to get flooded with anon hate? Is it just anxiety and paranoia? I don’t think so, because when I look at other people’s blogs, they do receive anon hate. Often for expressing the “wrong” moral opinion, but sometimes just directed at their general personality / character.
It’s not all blogs, though. Most people I follow don’t receive any anon hate (at least not that they reply to publicly). But a few people do.
So now I’m really curious: what sorts of blogs attract anon hate? Why is mine not one of them?
Is it a number-of-followers thing? I’m guessing that, if you have more followers, you’ll be more likely to receive anon hate. (This blog has about 100 followers.)
Are there topics of discussion that are more likely to attract haters? Presumably, the closer you get to The Discourse, the more hate you’ll receive. (But I post discourse-y things sometimes and I don’t get any hate for it.)
People who blog about moral issues, and who express firm, absolute moral convictions, seems to receive more hate than people who don’t.
Maybe it’s a gendered thing? When I mentally list blogs which get anon hate, it’s mostly women and trans people. (But I’m a woman and I don’t get anon hate.)
I’d be curious to hear whether other people receive anon hate, and whether anyone has any insight into this topic
I don’t have much insight into what causes variance in amount of hate received (and I basically never get anon hate), but I do have the same intuition (“that I need to be careful what I post or I’m going to get flooded with anon hate”) despite the fact that most of the responses to my posts are positive, and the negative ones are usually nice and reasonable.
I don’t think it’s totally irrational though, because dogpiling is a thing–most of my posts have never gotten any hate, but two have ended up reblogged by someone who made a scathing reply, and then l got lots of negative replies from all their followers and followers’ followers and it was a very unpleasant experience. Even a problematic post might have only like a 5% probability of being dogpiled, but the cost/benefit calculation works out such that I’d still rather avoid making them at all.