The Charitable Reading
Ten years of doing this. More than ten, honestly. A decade of publishing things online and waiting to see what strangers decide to do with them. Most of the time: nothing. Sometimes something genuinely good comes back—a message, a real exchange, evidence that another person actually engaged with what you put out. But reliably, consistently, at a rate that never drops to zero no matter what you write or how carefully you manage the audience: the shit.
Not criticism. Criticism is useful. I mean the stuff that has nothing to do with what you published—the reflexive, content-free hostility that arrives like a bill nobody agreed to. Racist, sexist, or just blankly cruel. Written by people who either have nothing else going on or have found that this particular discharge is too easy to stop. You build up a tolerance. You tell yourself it says more about them than about you, which is true and also fails completely to make it sting less.
Kelly, who makes YouTube videos as MissesVlog, posted something this week that a lot of people who create things online could have made but mostly don’t. In the video—which she titled "The Dark Side of YouTube"—she sits in front of her camera, visibly upset, and says the simple thing: I’m also just a human being. Before you insult someone on the internet next time, you should think about whether you really need that and whether you really have to do it that way. And if you have that urge, then I’m truly sorry for you.
She’s 21. Not long before, she’d told me in an interview that she’d made her peace with trolls. Her friend MrTrashpack had given her a frame that helped: people have a bad day, come home, need somewhere to dump it. If it lands harmlessly under one of her videos, she could live with that. I’ve operated on a version of the same logic myself, for years. It’s a reasonable way to survive the territory.
And then some days the framework collapses. You’re just a person in front of a camera and someone is being genuinely unkind for no reason that exists anywhere outside their own head, and the philosophical scaffolding you built doesn’t hold. That’s what the video is. Not a breakdown, not an appeal—just the honest acknowledgment that there is a real person on the other end of whatever you’re about to type.
If it makes even one idiot pause before sending and close the tab instead—go stare at the wall, collect some stamps, do literally anything else—then it did something. That’s probably optimistic. But hope is the last thing to go, and I’m not there yet.