Comment by thagsimmons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thagsimmons | Hacker News Reader

I had never heard of her, but decided to take a look at her content to try to tease together some part of her story. I sensed from the coverage that something was being elided here, and I was right.

It's clear she struggled with depression and some sort of compulsion to live in public in a painful, raw way, pretty much all her adult life. Like many people in her circumstances, she had a love-hate relationship with an audience that often abused her, but was also the source of her income. It's also clear that all of this took a turn for the worse recently. Less than a year ago she posted this rambling, semi-coherent rant that has since been scrubbed from her blog:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220811035913/https://dooce.com...

In it, she speaks about her history of mental illness, body dysphoria and attempted suicide. She also says some things about gender dysphoria: she objects to the fact that affirmation is the only treatment offered, is scornful of neo-pronouns, hints that she feels her non-binary children have been swept up in a social contagion, and praises the bravery of de-transitioners. Needless to say, people did not take this kindly, as the comments on her Instagram around this time shoes:

https://www.instagram.com/p/ChGWRv-JN2m/

She was subjected to an enormous torrent of self-righteous abuse by her fanbase in the wake of this. Podcasts were made, Reddit threads savaged her, Twitter did its sociopathic thing, and it dragged on for weeks and weeks.

I'm not saying her fanbase bullied her to death. But I am saying that the way she was treated surely didn't help.

Thank you. I had not previously heard of her.

One reason my own blogging has so little traction is that I have long had a personal policy of trying to weed out and actively ditch the kinds of negative attention women so frequently attract online. I want attention on my work, not on me per se.

I've spent a lot of years trying to sort out how to post good info without it going like it seems to have gone for her. Sure, she made good money, but at what price?

She sounds like she was miserable the entire time and ultimately died by her own hand rather than being able to use financial success to resolve her problems.

I'm resolving my problems. Maybe that means I'm too boring or something to ever be a commercially successful blogger or whatever. But it's a conscious choice and longstanding personal policy that my mental health and quality of life matter more than some kind of commercial success.

And I personally feel that when someone so unable to effectively address their personal problems makes "most influential" lists, it's likely not a good thing overall for the health of the world as a whole.

People who are so much drama tend to attract drama and promote drama without meaning to. They vent about a bad day and it ends up being some shitshow that comes back to bite them, not relief from their pain.

I don't say that as criticism of her. I say that as firsthand experience. People often like me but expect me to be at my best at all times and few people are compassionate or supportive when I'm the one in need of support.

A relationship to the public is not like private relationships and I think some people have trouble sorting that out and that fact can contribute to both popularity and an excess of negative and unwanted side effects accompanying their popularity.

I'm sorry she suffered so much and ultimately killed herself. Ideally, the world uses this story as a means to find better answers -- though I'm not holding my breath, frankly. The world often actively promotes such patterns and seems to punish people for trying to sort their problems.

A lot of people show up for the drama. It does something for them. And what it does to the author -- eh, "not my problem."

Good detective work.

...But it could be interpreted a different way, I think.

In that archived post, she writes "last year on August 31st, 2021, I attempted suicide" and "imagine experiencing suicidal ideation all day every day for the rest of your time on Earth. That's me."

Clearly the death-impulse long predates any bullying she might have received on account of that post.

And the post strikes a combative tone, doesn't it? It almost seems as though she were looking to generate controversy, intentionally. (Not that I disagree with her, but it should be obvious how the Reddit hivemind would react.) Sometimes picking a good fight can make you feel _alive._

There's a sort of "tragedy of the commons" that happens with Internet criticism, I think. Many people see a tweet that they find objectionable. Some of those send a reply or quote-tweet voicing criticism. Each of those replies publishes that original tweet to more and more people, some of whom will ALSO be compelled to put in their opinion.

The whole thing reaches an apparent fever pitch simply due to the volume of posts. The original poster is simply beset with negativity. The human mind is simply not psychologically capable of dealing with that kind of onslaught in a healthy way. Such a simple, innocuous phenomenon is at the root of it: I see something I disagree with and am compelled to respond. Nothing sinister is happening in the minds of those involved (at least for the vast majority).

But regardless of how odious the original tweet/post was, this is just not a productive way for us to conduct discourse. But how do you combat it? I don't have an answer.

How should we treat people who have chosen to post their political opinions on the Internet, when we strongly disagree with them?

Isn't responding or critiquing the ideas in a podcast, Reddit thread or a tweet exactly how a) the Internet, b) free speech, and c) liberal civil society are supposed to work?

Most of the time, the ideas are not critiqued, but instead it's an invective-filled ad hominem attack unleashed from all directions.

Not sure I agree with "most of the time", but anyway, isn't my friend's critique of ideas somewhat similar to my enemy's invective-filled ad hominem attack? Don't these all fall within perfectly ok behavior between adults who have chosen to spend time reading each others' thoughts?

I don't think so at all. Civilized debate over ideas? Great. Middle-school-tier name-calling, shaming tactics, and attempts to get someone fired from their job because you disagree with them? Completely unacceptable. Are we all in middle school now because we don't have to look at each other face to face?

You'd think she would have been more sympathetic to trans people and understanding of the anger underlying a lot of the response, given all that.

It's true that not enough space is given to de-transitioners, but much of the discourse focuses on the very, very, very tiny number of people who did it because they didn't have dysphoria rather than the vast majority who did it because the social stigma and difficulty with employment turned out to be worse than the dysphoria. Detransition is turned into a weapon against trans people when it should be something that exists at peace with the majority who transition and are happy with it.

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