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Double up on your popcorn this week folks, because MK, Pru, and The Hoyden take a journey of terrible discovery in the depths of your favorite (and least favorite) fanfic tropes. We cover everything from soulbonding to soulbonding with a mind meld, and detour in the land of magical ass babies and high school AUs along the way. If that sounds like your cup of tea, or perhaps you are just a keen fan of listening to auditory train wrecks, crank up the volume and settle in, because /report is always happy to serve.

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Get ready to ruin yourself forever and go download or stream this week's episode!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

erika

I'd been on LJ for a year when I posted the entry. I was seventeen, extremely disaffected, clinically depressed, and alienated. In addition, I read very fast, and I was hungry for a lot more intellectual stimulation than I was getting in high school, so I had a lot of friends. Perfect storm, probably.

When I posted the entry, it was 2003, around march 22nd. The entry itself was pretty simple: the title of the entry was "Who do you hate" and I just asked people to name names & give reasons and reassured people that it would all be anonymous & I wouldn't censor anything until & unless I was forced to, or if it got off-topic. (Ugh. Basically imagine that I'm wincing the entire time I'm writing all of this, because I am.)

I remember considering making the entry friends-only to begin with, but it's impossible to allow anonymous comments on a friends-only entry, so that was out. I wasn't interested in counter-attacks and defensive crap being pulled; I was sincerely curious.

I didn't do it because I was upset with anyone in particular, and interestingly enough, I actually never said anything on the meme. I pretended I had, to make other people more comfortable (I know, wtf? but seriously, I've been in therapy for 6 years and I can't explain that), but it was more like... I don't know. Poking a stick in an anthill to see what happened. Also lots of twisted psychological reasons, and mostly, to be honest, the stupidity of being 16. The internet equivalent of a slam-book, I guess, or really nasty gossip: I just wanted to know what inspired others to dislike someone who they really only knew through words.

Erm, and also I was bored. I think it was spring break for my high school at the time. Yeah. This isn't really defensible, I know, I'm just trying to explain what the hell I was thinking.

I remember that the first person to post a comment actually wasn't on my friends' list at all, as far as I could tell— the person linked in that comment wasn't on my flist, nor on the flist of any of my friends. That should have been a hint that this was getting way bigger than I expected it to, but I didn't realize that.

I was still on dialup (or possibly a very low-speed ADSL connection) & had left comments turned on, so I remember logging on to check my email and ending up having to download something like 300 comments after only being gone to sleep.

LJ Abuse emailed me and made me take it down after around four days, but I don't have that email anymore because that was 2 addresses ago. :(

I did do did a search thru my archives for the aftermath of that entry. Oddly enough, no one has dropped me since I posted the semi-infamous entry asking you all to list who you hate on lj (this explains a little bit of what I thought was my rationale for creating a hate meme in the first place), Just checking to make sure that the internet hasn't blown up., and a poll on whether I should delete that shit or not.

(The poll is interesting, mainly because I had 140 respondents-- before the meme, I think I had maybe 100 friends-of [who actually read my journal regularly] at the time, so people were evidently more interested in my journal, which was an unforeseen side-effect.)

LJ Abuse "graciously" requested that I not formally announce taking down the hate meme, but didn't prohibit me mentioning it in the comments, so.

The grand total of comments when I was forced to delete the entry by LJ Abuse was "900+", which doesn't sound like a lot until you realize that TWO LJ news posts about a redesign posted at around the same time only had 500ish combined.

It seems like now, pretty much everyone with a brain knows that hate memes are bad juju, but honestly, looking back, it seemed like it was a 50/50 reaction initially: half the people who knew me before I posted it seemed to think that I was encouraging the bad side of people to come out blah blah serial killers etc Godwin, and the other half seemed like they thought it was just shit people would be thinking and not saying and that talking about how someone's writing style & font choice secretly indicated that they were a horrible person who needed to die was just blowing off some steam.

Basically, the reactions were totally polarized. I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was really shocked at that— I felt like Sherlock might feel, I guess: is this how people really react to something that bothers/upsets them? Rationalize it into harmlessness or vilify it into Ragnarok? No middle ground, no interest in seeing the experiment play out?

That was the most shocking thing to me, I think. Of course now I understand that I had encouraged people to verbally attack anyone they had a grudge against, and what a powder-keg that was, but at the time I just thought it should have been pretty harmless.

However, now that I am NOT seventeen, emotionally, mentally, & chronologically, I can say categorically that this is one of the very few things in my life I truly regret. LJ Abuse has done some truly amazingly shitty things, but forcing me to take that entry down was the right thing to do.

Finally, even though I hate that this is true: if it hadn't been me, someone else would have done it eventually. But—that doesn't excuse it. As I said, there's no excuse. Maybe there would've been another few months, or a year without the idea occurring to someone on LJ, and maybe it never would've taken off without someone with as many friends as me posting it, and all of that. There's no way for me to know.

(if you have any further questions, let me know--I think I covered just about everything, but thankfully I've lost that supreme confidence in my own infallibility that is the most annoying thing to me about teenagers)

Edited (math is hard, i was seventeen!) Date: 2012-06-18 04:01 pm (UTC)