Some people were mean about me on the internet

It finally happened - some people were mean about me on the internet. It was a somewhat chastening, but ultimately kind of meh experience and I’ll tell you about it.

When I first started this blog, I had the vague hope that at some point, one of my posts would “go viral” for a depressingly small value of “viral”. I like to read/browse Hacker News and so I’ve been submitting my posts there. I had the notion that “success” for the year would be:

1. Keeping on posting - I’ve no firm idea what this means exactly. I don’t want to keep up posting every day, but at least once a week would be good.
2. Get to the front page of Hacker News

Two days ago, with my post on “banning things for other people is easy”…I didn’t just get to the homepage…I got to position 1. On day 10!

Achievements aren’t everything

Firstly, let’s be blunt. As far as achievements go, briefly being number 1 on a niche forum’s leaderboard gets me no money, no glory, no fame. It’s not a huge achievement for any reasonable definition of the word achievement. However, I also have to say that I didn’t feel any sense of pride or happiness about being in position 1.

I mainly felt nervous that everybody would know I didn’t know enough to be writing about politics and would tear me apart and point out all my obvious mistakes.

People being mean

The message thread at the moment has 107 comments on it, and there’s a really interesting mix. A lot of people are pointing out my obvious mistakes and the weakness of my arguments, but weirdly I’m not at all uncomfortable about that. I think people tend to misunderstand in a way that they want to - people who don’t want to ban social media think I’m arguing that we should, people who do want to ban social media think I’m arguing we shouldn’t. Maybe I should have made my argument clearer, but at least a few commenters seem to have found it. Some people thought I must be an LLM because the argument was so weak, or that I don’t have enough domain expertise to have an opinion.

There was probably only one comment that made me laugh because it skewered me so effectively: one saying that it’s easy to write an article saying what’s wrong but without proposing a solution. I agree - that’s both exactly what I did, and the reason I did it was because I couldn’t think of a good solution!

Fair play to that commentator. Fair play.

What next

Well…I sort of achieved my blog goal after only 10 days. It’d be tempting to seek further ‘fame’ by targetting my blog posts to topics that clearly generate a lot of “heat” (which is basically banning social media). However, given how little joy I actually got from getting my 1 second of fame…I think I’ll skip that and just write about what I want.

If I’m going to make this blog stick, I think it’s probably the only way.