How many pieces of media really are "shoved down your throat" in life? The only example I can think of is pop music--since they play it at the supermarket, I physically can't escape it if I want to eat. (And that goes 10x for anyone who actually works in retail.) So I have a bit of sympathy for people who HATE Taylor Swift or Imagine Dragons or whatever.
Most other stuff, when people say "it's shoved down your throat", they mean "I saw an ad for it" or "my friend talked to me about it".
yeah I remember when Game of Thrones, a show I had no interest in watching, was on it was like there was about a day and a half every week where my social media feed would switch to first live-tweeting GoT, then feverishly discussing the episode's implications. And then when the last season was on I remember my local liquor story was advertising some GoT tie-in whiskey. It was everywhere and naturally a little annoying since I wasn't interested… but also if I'd joined a subreddit for posting about my rage every time a friend of mine livetweeted "omg!!!" when it was airing, I would truly have lost the plot lol.
And that is part of why when it's Taylor season over here I try to put her name in the head or subhead so that people who just do not want more Taylor in their lives can just ignore it. Whether because they still wake up with nightmares about "Shake It Off" from retail or for some other reason.
Nice post. As a child of the internet, I've spent my fair share of time on snark communities, but those were usually a bit more level - people on one live journal community making fun of another live journal/reddit/Tumblr community e.g. Whereas the anti-fandoms on reddit etc devoted to hate-stalking an influencer who profits from oversharing is a very different dynamic, and one I think may be more pernicious (though could I justify it to myself?)
I spent a few months reading a snark community online focused on online fundamentalist Christian influencers, because I don't know much about fundamentalist Christians as a godless city-dweller, but what you realize is that when every very boring post is getting torn apart by 50-100 people every day folks start fixating on mundane and totally normal and fine stuff. Given that many of the online fundamentalist influencers are young mothers, it often turns into gross, gross misogyny - primarily perpetrated by women who I'm sure would call themselves feminists!
I think in some ways the old internet could be way crueler but in other ways something like fandom_wank was sort of impersonally dedicated to documenting ridiculous behavior.… kind of like r/HobbyDrama now.
I’m totally fascinated by the stuff about Lonesome Gal and Count Sheep. Even in the 50s the moment you invent ASMR you also invent sexy ASMR videos. The human mind is so powerful
Yeah, some of the photos of Lonesome Gal on the linked instagram -- especially the ones from behind/at a distance -- there's no way you're convincing me those weren't taken in the last decade
"If your algorithm is serving up stuff you hate, you train it to give you other stuff. If you refuse to do this, on some level, you should admit to yourself that you like it and that you are as much the audience for this material as the imagined sheep-like fans you both despise and act to 'protect.'"
Or, if you don't positively like it, you're accepting it: changing it isn't worth your while.
Those of us habituated to answering near any online advertising query with, "No, thanks," may find we're being served ads we dislike because those are the ads of last resort, default ads for when the algorithm doesn't really know what we want. Indifference, as well as hate, has its costs.
"It appears that by saying no to the ads it thinks I want, I end up with the ads no one wants. Those earwax videos are in everyone’s feed because they are thrown out en masse, with little personalisation or analytical targeting. They are the ads of last resort."
I haven't asked myself before if there are sheep-like fans of scammy earwax reduction methods. Maybe there are. (There's ear candling, if nothing else.) But there don't have to be if earwax ads are indiscriminate last-ditch advertising.
Sometimes I click on an ad for something I find pretty, even if I'd never buy it, just to get a break from so much earwax. But often, I don't bother. I don't like being one of the interweb's Default Earwax Ad People. But I don't hate it, either. I can even think of upsides, like fewer occasions for impulse spending.
This is true! I wasn't really thinking about straight up ads, more like… if you don't want to see running influencers in your instagram, you can just not interact with their stuff. But now I'm interested in this earwax business. I'd never heard of this.
The earwax ads suggest that if you haven't heard of them, perhaps they can be of service to you.
It's obvious from a few searches I've done (which'll likely only... increase... the earwax ads I get for now) that many people notice, and are annoyed by, online earwax ads, but likely nowhere near enough to matter.
For example, this petition to stop earwax ads exists, but with only 24 signatures:
Someone claimed Mar 31, 2025 on TwiX that "Ads on here now fall into two categories: gross things (earwax removal, blackhead removal) or disgusting things (N*zi propaganda)", suggesting a comparable frequency of the two on TwiX, at least.
-is that radio show the origin of Madame Psychosis in Infinite Jest??
-what's especially wild to me is how easily this can scale up or scale down. In the comics world, a gigantic chunk of traffic on comics twitter is driven by these absurd parasocial obsessions with writers and artists that have, like, 10k followers. I've seen it with comics *bloggers* with half that following.
If you ever have the inclination, I think you'll enjoy it, and even if you don't enjoy it, you will probably enjoy writing about what you don't enjoy about it, if that makes any sense lol
I really like Brief Interviews With Hideous Men… I'll get to it sometime. I actually have a funny story about buying Infinite Jest at a bookstore in New York, which I will now share. I had had a previous experience buying David Foster Wallace in a bookstore in Charlottesville and distinctly feeling like the clerk kind of gave me the stinkeye. Furthermore, at the time I was purchasing my copy of Infinite Jest, we had probably just passed the apex of David Foster Wallace Red Flag discourse.
So I went up to counter with my copy of Infinite Jest and said something like, you know, sometimes there are books it's just sort of embarrassing to buy because it feels like you should already own them. And the guy behind the counter said….
"Oh, is this book, like, famous?"
And I was like, I think it is.…
So he said, what's it about?
And I, having really no sense of what it is about then or now, said: uhhhhhhhhhh… tennis… I think.…
I imagine you will read it at some point as a Very Literate Person, and my poorly considered wager is... BDM finds lots of things in it worth talking about but doesn't necessarily "like" it.
One thing the internet has taught, especially in recent years, is that there are people who don’t see being loathsome as a flaw. Some people seem not to feel bad about the way they behave ever. It’s like I have to anthropomorphize them to process their behavior — their minds work differently. While I think if we understood their traumas or brain chemistry, they could be pleasant, they don’t want to be pleasant and don’t see it as a worthy goal.
They could avoid all this unpleasant, aggravation and anger by not participating, but somehow I think they’d view that as defeat.
I think the worst parasocial hating relationship I've been in was with the McElroy Brothers (lol). I didn't even hate their stuff, I originally really enjoyed their stuff, but their work went in a direction I reallly disliked and then all of a sudden I loved reading all of the hate. I guess I wanted validation that my critical opinion was correct. Many such cases!
"If you resent somebody for successfully capturing and monetizing your attention, sure, I would too, but the way to deal with that is to withdraw that attention. If your algorithm is serving up stuff you hate, you train it to give you other stuff." Kind of my relationship with Substack to a tee. Unfortunately I don't really know if some of these algorithms are all that fixable anymore nowadays (especially here!). I was going crazy with certain types of pieces I was getting recommended here, so I legit spent a day just clicking on thought-daughter articles just to cleanse the feed, but it didn't work. Lots of the things that I hate here (boosterism, hatred of legacy institutions) is essentially baked into the platform at a certain point, and there's only so much individuals can do without pouring tons of time into it.
so glad i'm not alone lol. but yeah totally, i remember gobbling up that video of him playing Amongus (so depressing lol) and thinking 'wow this guy needs help', but also whomst among us hasn't gotten totally pissed when we get pwned at a game. Very relatable, but not to me because I am a totally level-headed gamer and i never lose.
Danny, what kind of McElroy wormholes did you fall into? MBMBAM? TAZ? Monster Factory? I gotta know. Typing those words makes me feel so old
My entry point was Monster Factory and the other Polygon stuff (remember Car Boys with Nick whats his name?). Then MBMBaM and TAZ Balance. The end of Balance was when I started to realize the fandom and the way the brothers interacted with it was much stranger than I realized. When Griffin did the big reveal that Barry Bluejeans was still alive and everyone was losing their minds and I just had no idea what was happening because I wasn't on reddit obsessing over the lore of a comedy podcast.
TAZ Appalachia was so boring and they'd gotten stuck in all their characters needing to be unimpeachably good people; it was just unlistenable. By the time that ended Travis seemed to be having an acute narcissistic break so when they killed Yahoo Answers I took it as a sign to dip out entirely. It was right at the end here that I found a McElroys hate subreddit which I looked at for one day before realizing I had to get out of there; it remains my only experience with the stuff.
My only other toxic parasocial experience, relatedly, was coming to despise Russ Frushtick from Polygon for being annoying during their PUBG streams.
Remembering all this makes me feel like crumbling into dust like an aged skeleton
Lol I too remember all of this. The first season of TAZ got me through a very boring dishwasher job (jesus, ten years ago now??). And the early monster factory stuff is one of the few times I remember laughing so hard at something that I was in acute physical pain. Their whole thing got very annoying and I have no idea where they are now but I owe them for that so I hope they are happy and not trapped in some eternal wholesome reddit hell of their own making.
I love that this is giving us all an existential crisis over the passage of time lol. Maybe an interesting question to think about how parasocial relationships interact with our perception of time--does their indefinite, weekly presence help to create a sense of the eternal present? Is this why fans get so insane about like a podcast host getting divorced--how dare their life be advancing and changing?
god this is all too real. Yeah it was Nick Robinson, and Car Boys was great but unfortunately NR got cancelled so that working relationship ended... Yes I remember when Balance ended, thinking 'hmmm this is a little too parasocial even for my tastes'. TAZ was fun until it wasn't, you could tell that there was a moment where they stopped having fun and started attempting to tell interesting stories and it just didn't work. I listened to a bit of TAZ Appalachia and it was, like you said, totally unlistenable. I dropped off right at the end of Yahoo Answers too. I think the last time I actively listened was when MBMBAM changed their theme music, also i just remembered that they changed the theme because John Roderick did the 'bean dad' thing on Twitter. LOL.
My Step Bro and I were both into the McElroys (especially the video game stuff), so I got him live tickets to MBMBAM and it just sounded like it was a miserable time. Like the fans were unhinged and did not know how to behave socially. People would ask questions as if they were auditioning to be the fourth brother. I listened to a recording and felt totally bad for, like, subjecting a family member to torture.
This feels like ancient history now. It makes me feel insane to type this stuff out loud
It was possible to have experiences like this prior to the internet, in various forms of fan culture around music. One of the things that I'm somewhat embarrassed about is my decades-long anger at David Bowie at not putting out albums that I liked. He's an artist whose work from the '70s I really identified with, and I never really got over him moving on from that work, and could bore you with long explanations of why his later work sucked. Still can, for what it's worth.
That kind of intense identification expressing hate as much as love was a big part of the development of punk rock in the late '70s and early '80s. Punk was basically loud, arena rock played in little clubs, where you could literally attack the singer if you wanted to. You can see this in a scene in the documentary "The Decline of Western Civilization", where the band Fear antagonizes the audience until one of them takes a swing at the singer, and then start playing. (Extreme trigger warnings for misogyny and homophobia.)
Nick Cave and Henry Rollins were probably the most extreme versions of this, where a significant part of the audience at a Black Flag or Birthday Party show were there to take a swing at the singer. It's worth noting that both of them ended up developing sophisticated aesthetic personas over time, so negative parasociality is not necessarily a dead end for either the artists or the fans who participate in it.
I'm pretty ruthless with my Substack algorithm and it's worked, but I don't know how easy it is to fix once it goes wrong, it's true. Like I do think Substack Notes has a problem where like you subscribe to just a couple people and suddenly you're trapped in their conversations, which would be good if you wanted to be there, but if you don't.…
Totally. I think I've just reached the same place as Brandon Taylor with realizing that Notes is somehow uniquely bad for my brain and that I just have to stop using it. Easier said than done tho lol
This has been going as long as we had the Internet. People used to make websites about Interesting Characters (mostly annoying, full of themselves, braggadocio idiots) on usenet, the proto-forums of the then net.
As with everything right now, the problem is inhumane scale and the ease of access. Back then you had a person of interest vs. few people in misaimed fandom and maybe few hundred of gawkers.
Now, you can tell tens of people to "kill themselves" from a comfort of your toilet to an applause of millions. And you can even get a monetary reward for that!
I sort of go back and forth on this because I feel like the early Internet could be way crueler but it was also more contained. Something like the story of Sonichu is hard to imagine happening on TikTok, but on the other hand, it wouldn't have been in the NYT.
In middle school, when my dad took us to brunch after church, if he ever smelled or ordered bacon, he would tell us the story of Misery. The first several times, he didn’t let on that it was a fictional story, and so it had an additional layer of horror.
I still have not seen or read it, but I feel secure saying it made a lasting impact on me.
As someone who has definitely been on the unhealthy side of the parasocial, I think that it's either:
- the hated person has annoying qualities that remind the poster of somebody else in their lives that they can't as easily slag off
- the hated person has annoying qualities that remind the poster of themselves but it's impossible to accept those qualities or it's reassuring that somebody is always worse?
I also cannot think of a man that this has happened to unless he was blatantly mentally ill and the people involved were also very, very creepy. Women can be despised for any old reason, too ugly, too pretty, too successful, not successful enough, dying, not dying, fat, skinny, smart, dumb... the list is endless
I hate you because you're not my mom vs I hate you because you are my mom…
I can think of a _handful_ of guys this happened to… but I agree it's mostly women, especially if you're just sticking to reddit. Snarkers are also mostly women on reddit too…
This would fit in with something that came to mind when I was reading your post, that the phenomenon seemed a lot like Melanie Klein's theory of children splitting the image of the mother into a benevolent mother and an evil witch.
The idea is that because children are completely dependent on caregivers, they can't allow themselves to believe that they are anything except loving, benevolent, all-powerful figures, so that whenever they run into behavior that conflicts with that belief, they compensate with a belief that the seeming mother is really a figure of evil.
You're right, there are plenty of male haters but I don't think I've ever run into a full-on straight male snarker. It's all women with the very occasional gay man.
I do think once you leave Reddit it's a different story, but that might depend on how we parse the distinction of hater vs snarker. Whole chapters of hater studies really remain to be written…
I was just thinking about this re: r/foodiesnark. So many people lining up to hate on someone whose recipes they repeatedly make in their kitchens and put in their mouths. Maybe it's a weird form of intimacy that helps them feel like they're not in danger of collapsing into a bigger personality
I do often wonder how the divide between snarking and real life functions for the people who are actually like, fully employed lol. There's some influencer who occasionally mentions dealing with infertility and apparently her snarkers have tried to reverse engineer her cycle to prove she's lying? Like do you ever mention to the other people in your life that this is how you spend your free time or…
Just have to say that “She is ‘more famous’ than me, but so is an unusually big state fair pumpkin” is a perfect sentence. Thank you.
How many pieces of media really are "shoved down your throat" in life? The only example I can think of is pop music--since they play it at the supermarket, I physically can't escape it if I want to eat. (And that goes 10x for anyone who actually works in retail.) So I have a bit of sympathy for people who HATE Taylor Swift or Imagine Dragons or whatever.
Most other stuff, when people say "it's shoved down your throat", they mean "I saw an ad for it" or "my friend talked to me about it".
yeah I remember when Game of Thrones, a show I had no interest in watching, was on it was like there was about a day and a half every week where my social media feed would switch to first live-tweeting GoT, then feverishly discussing the episode's implications. And then when the last season was on I remember my local liquor story was advertising some GoT tie-in whiskey. It was everywhere and naturally a little annoying since I wasn't interested… but also if I'd joined a subreddit for posting about my rage every time a friend of mine livetweeted "omg!!!" when it was airing, I would truly have lost the plot lol.
And that is part of why when it's Taylor season over here I try to put her name in the head or subhead so that people who just do not want more Taylor in their lives can just ignore it. Whether because they still wake up with nightmares about "Shake It Off" from retail or for some other reason.
Attention Is Attention Is Attention IS ATTENTION.
reading this to myself in the voice of the lonesome gal
Nice post. As a child of the internet, I've spent my fair share of time on snark communities, but those were usually a bit more level - people on one live journal community making fun of another live journal/reddit/Tumblr community e.g. Whereas the anti-fandoms on reddit etc devoted to hate-stalking an influencer who profits from oversharing is a very different dynamic, and one I think may be more pernicious (though could I justify it to myself?)
I spent a few months reading a snark community online focused on online fundamentalist Christian influencers, because I don't know much about fundamentalist Christians as a godless city-dweller, but what you realize is that when every very boring post is getting torn apart by 50-100 people every day folks start fixating on mundane and totally normal and fine stuff. Given that many of the online fundamentalist influencers are young mothers, it often turns into gross, gross misogyny - primarily perpetrated by women who I'm sure would call themselves feminists!
i currently satisfy the snark itch with https://old.reddit.com/r/blogsnarkmetasnark/
I think in some ways the old internet could be way crueler but in other ways something like fandom_wank was sort of impersonally dedicated to documenting ridiculous behavior.… kind of like r/HobbyDrama now.
I’m totally fascinated by the stuff about Lonesome Gal and Count Sheep. Even in the 50s the moment you invent ASMR you also invent sexy ASMR videos. The human mind is so powerful
Yeah, some of the photos of Lonesome Gal on the linked instagram -- especially the ones from behind/at a distance -- there's no way you're convincing me those weren't taken in the last decade
the yearning gal
I know!!! Crazy 😭
"If your algorithm is serving up stuff you hate, you train it to give you other stuff. If you refuse to do this, on some level, you should admit to yourself that you like it and that you are as much the audience for this material as the imagined sheep-like fans you both despise and act to 'protect.'"
Or, if you don't positively like it, you're accepting it: changing it isn't worth your while.
Those of us habituated to answering near any online advertising query with, "No, thanks," may find we're being served ads we dislike because those are the ads of last resort, default ads for when the algorithm doesn't really know what we want. Indifference, as well as hate, has its costs.
"It appears that by saying no to the ads it thinks I want, I end up with the ads no one wants. Those earwax videos are in everyone’s feed because they are thrown out en masse, with little personalisation or analytical targeting. They are the ads of last resort."
https://www.thetimes.com/world/ireland-world/article/ad-blockers-default-age-setting-google-ads-earwax-problem-r9h0wq5md
I haven't asked myself before if there are sheep-like fans of scammy earwax reduction methods. Maybe there are. (There's ear candling, if nothing else.) But there don't have to be if earwax ads are indiscriminate last-ditch advertising.
Sometimes I click on an ad for something I find pretty, even if I'd never buy it, just to get a break from so much earwax. But often, I don't bother. I don't like being one of the interweb's Default Earwax Ad People. But I don't hate it, either. I can even think of upsides, like fewer occasions for impulse spending.
This is true! I wasn't really thinking about straight up ads, more like… if you don't want to see running influencers in your instagram, you can just not interact with their stuff. But now I'm interested in this earwax business. I'd never heard of this.
The earwax ads suggest that if you haven't heard of them, perhaps they can be of service to you.
It's obvious from a few searches I've done (which'll likely only... increase... the earwax ads I get for now) that many people notice, and are annoyed by, online earwax ads, but likely nowhere near enough to matter.
For example, this petition to stop earwax ads exists, but with only 24 signatures:
https://www.change.org/p/google-inc-i-am-fed-up-with-seeing-google-s-disgusting-earwax-or-tonsil-stone-ads-they-should-stop
Someone claimed Mar 31, 2025 on TwiX that "Ads on here now fall into two categories: gross things (earwax removal, blackhead removal) or disgusting things (N*zi propaganda)", suggesting a comparable frequency of the two on TwiX, at least.
https://x.com/AmandaFGodsey/status/1906826753592467946
couple of extremely minor thoughts
-is that radio show the origin of Madame Psychosis in Infinite Jest??
-what's especially wild to me is how easily this can scale up or scale down. In the comics world, a gigantic chunk of traffic on comics twitter is driven by these absurd parasocial obsessions with writers and artists that have, like, 10k followers. I've seen it with comics *bloggers* with half that following.
I was just thinking of this !!
I've never read Infinite Jest 😔
If you ever have the inclination, I think you'll enjoy it, and even if you don't enjoy it, you will probably enjoy writing about what you don't enjoy about it, if that makes any sense lol
I really like Brief Interviews With Hideous Men… I'll get to it sometime. I actually have a funny story about buying Infinite Jest at a bookstore in New York, which I will now share. I had had a previous experience buying David Foster Wallace in a bookstore in Charlottesville and distinctly feeling like the clerk kind of gave me the stinkeye. Furthermore, at the time I was purchasing my copy of Infinite Jest, we had probably just passed the apex of David Foster Wallace Red Flag discourse.
So I went up to counter with my copy of Infinite Jest and said something like, you know, sometimes there are books it's just sort of embarrassing to buy because it feels like you should already own them. And the guy behind the counter said….
"Oh, is this book, like, famous?"
And I was like, I think it is.…
So he said, what's it about?
And I, having really no sense of what it is about then or now, said: uhhhhhhhhhh… tennis… I think.…
I imagine you will read it at some point as a Very Literate Person, and my poorly considered wager is... BDM finds lots of things in it worth talking about but doesn't necessarily "like" it.
One thing the internet has taught, especially in recent years, is that there are people who don’t see being loathsome as a flaw. Some people seem not to feel bad about the way they behave ever. It’s like I have to anthropomorphize them to process their behavior — their minds work differently. While I think if we understood their traumas or brain chemistry, they could be pleasant, they don’t want to be pleasant and don’t see it as a worthy goal.
They could avoid all this unpleasant, aggravation and anger by not participating, but somehow I think they’d view that as defeat.
Sort of like a sunk cost fallacy but for anger I guess.
I think the worst parasocial hating relationship I've been in was with the McElroy Brothers (lol). I didn't even hate their stuff, I originally really enjoyed their stuff, but their work went in a direction I reallly disliked and then all of a sudden I loved reading all of the hate. I guess I wanted validation that my critical opinion was correct. Many such cases!
"If you resent somebody for successfully capturing and monetizing your attention, sure, I would too, but the way to deal with that is to withdraw that attention. If your algorithm is serving up stuff you hate, you train it to give you other stuff." Kind of my relationship with Substack to a tee. Unfortunately I don't really know if some of these algorithms are all that fixable anymore nowadays (especially here!). I was going crazy with certain types of pieces I was getting recommended here, so I legit spent a day just clicking on thought-daughter articles just to cleanse the feed, but it didn't work. Lots of the things that I hate here (boosterism, hatred of legacy institutions) is essentially baked into the platform at a certain point, and there's only so much individuals can do without pouring tons of time into it.
Lol I went through this with the McElroys too. I hope Travis has gotten professional help by now
so glad i'm not alone lol. but yeah totally, i remember gobbling up that video of him playing Amongus (so depressing lol) and thinking 'wow this guy needs help', but also whomst among us hasn't gotten totally pissed when we get pwned at a game. Very relatable, but not to me because I am a totally level-headed gamer and i never lose.
Danny, what kind of McElroy wormholes did you fall into? MBMBAM? TAZ? Monster Factory? I gotta know. Typing those words makes me feel so old
The only McElroy podcast I listen to is Sawbones, the one Justin M does with his lovely doctor wife Sydney, and I like it that way lol
My entry point was Monster Factory and the other Polygon stuff (remember Car Boys with Nick whats his name?). Then MBMBaM and TAZ Balance. The end of Balance was when I started to realize the fandom and the way the brothers interacted with it was much stranger than I realized. When Griffin did the big reveal that Barry Bluejeans was still alive and everyone was losing their minds and I just had no idea what was happening because I wasn't on reddit obsessing over the lore of a comedy podcast.
TAZ Appalachia was so boring and they'd gotten stuck in all their characters needing to be unimpeachably good people; it was just unlistenable. By the time that ended Travis seemed to be having an acute narcissistic break so when they killed Yahoo Answers I took it as a sign to dip out entirely. It was right at the end here that I found a McElroys hate subreddit which I looked at for one day before realizing I had to get out of there; it remains my only experience with the stuff.
My only other toxic parasocial experience, relatedly, was coming to despise Russ Frushtick from Polygon for being annoying during their PUBG streams.
Remembering all this makes me feel like crumbling into dust like an aged skeleton
Lol I too remember all of this. The first season of TAZ got me through a very boring dishwasher job (jesus, ten years ago now??). And the early monster factory stuff is one of the few times I remember laughing so hard at something that I was in acute physical pain. Their whole thing got very annoying and I have no idea where they are now but I owe them for that so I hope they are happy and not trapped in some eternal wholesome reddit hell of their own making.
I love that this is giving us all an existential crisis over the passage of time lol. Maybe an interesting question to think about how parasocial relationships interact with our perception of time--does their indefinite, weekly presence help to create a sense of the eternal present? Is this why fans get so insane about like a podcast host getting divorced--how dare their life be advancing and changing?
god this is all too real. Yeah it was Nick Robinson, and Car Boys was great but unfortunately NR got cancelled so that working relationship ended... Yes I remember when Balance ended, thinking 'hmmm this is a little too parasocial even for my tastes'. TAZ was fun until it wasn't, you could tell that there was a moment where they stopped having fun and started attempting to tell interesting stories and it just didn't work. I listened to a bit of TAZ Appalachia and it was, like you said, totally unlistenable. I dropped off right at the end of Yahoo Answers too. I think the last time I actively listened was when MBMBAM changed their theme music, also i just remembered that they changed the theme because John Roderick did the 'bean dad' thing on Twitter. LOL.
My Step Bro and I were both into the McElroys (especially the video game stuff), so I got him live tickets to MBMBAM and it just sounded like it was a miserable time. Like the fans were unhinged and did not know how to behave socially. People would ask questions as if they were auditioning to be the fourth brother. I listened to a recording and felt totally bad for, like, subjecting a family member to torture.
This feels like ancient history now. It makes me feel insane to type this stuff out loud
Oof man that live show. You know it smell crazy in there. I'm going to be senile on my deathbed muttering "John Roderick was Bean Dad"
It was possible to have experiences like this prior to the internet, in various forms of fan culture around music. One of the things that I'm somewhat embarrassed about is my decades-long anger at David Bowie at not putting out albums that I liked. He's an artist whose work from the '70s I really identified with, and I never really got over him moving on from that work, and could bore you with long explanations of why his later work sucked. Still can, for what it's worth.
That kind of intense identification expressing hate as much as love was a big part of the development of punk rock in the late '70s and early '80s. Punk was basically loud, arena rock played in little clubs, where you could literally attack the singer if you wanted to. You can see this in a scene in the documentary "The Decline of Western Civilization", where the band Fear antagonizes the audience until one of them takes a swing at the singer, and then start playing. (Extreme trigger warnings for misogyny and homophobia.)
Nick Cave and Henry Rollins were probably the most extreme versions of this, where a significant part of the audience at a Black Flag or Birthday Party show were there to take a swing at the singer. It's worth noting that both of them ended up developing sophisticated aesthetic personas over time, so negative parasociality is not necessarily a dead end for either the artists or the fans who participate in it.
I'm pretty ruthless with my Substack algorithm and it's worked, but I don't know how easy it is to fix once it goes wrong, it's true. Like I do think Substack Notes has a problem where like you subscribe to just a couple people and suddenly you're trapped in their conversations, which would be good if you wanted to be there, but if you don't.…
Totally. I think I've just reached the same place as Brandon Taylor with realizing that Notes is somehow uniquely bad for my brain and that I just have to stop using it. Easier said than done tho lol
This has been going as long as we had the Internet. People used to make websites about Interesting Characters (mostly annoying, full of themselves, braggadocio idiots) on usenet, the proto-forums of the then net.
As with everything right now, the problem is inhumane scale and the ease of access. Back then you had a person of interest vs. few people in misaimed fandom and maybe few hundred of gawkers.
Now, you can tell tens of people to "kill themselves" from a comfort of your toilet to an applause of millions. And you can even get a monetary reward for that!
I sort of go back and forth on this because I feel like the early Internet could be way crueler but it was also more contained. Something like the story of Sonichu is hard to imagine happening on TikTok, but on the other hand, it wouldn't have been in the NYT.
In middle school, when my dad took us to brunch after church, if he ever smelled or ordered bacon, he would tell us the story of Misery. The first several times, he didn’t let on that it was a fictional story, and so it had an additional layer of horror.
I still have not seen or read it, but I feel secure saying it made a lasting impact on me.
a version of this story happened to me with spontaneous human combustion, of which i have lived in fear ever since
As someone who has definitely been on the unhealthy side of the parasocial, I think that it's either:
- the hated person has annoying qualities that remind the poster of somebody else in their lives that they can't as easily slag off
- the hated person has annoying qualities that remind the poster of themselves but it's impossible to accept those qualities or it's reassuring that somebody is always worse?
I also cannot think of a man that this has happened to unless he was blatantly mentally ill and the people involved were also very, very creepy. Women can be despised for any old reason, too ugly, too pretty, too successful, not successful enough, dying, not dying, fat, skinny, smart, dumb... the list is endless
I hate you because you're not my mom vs I hate you because you are my mom…
I can think of a _handful_ of guys this happened to… but I agree it's mostly women, especially if you're just sticking to reddit. Snarkers are also mostly women on reddit too…
This would fit in with something that came to mind when I was reading your post, that the phenomenon seemed a lot like Melanie Klein's theory of children splitting the image of the mother into a benevolent mother and an evil witch.
The idea is that because children are completely dependent on caregivers, they can't allow themselves to believe that they are anything except loving, benevolent, all-powerful figures, so that whenever they run into behavior that conflicts with that belief, they compensate with a belief that the seeming mother is really a figure of evil.
I really gotta read Melanie Klein damn.
This article has a good section on splitting, as well as other forms of projection and tranference: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3330415/
The internet is just the Viennese family writ large.
You're right, there are plenty of male haters but I don't think I've ever run into a full-on straight male snarker. It's all women with the very occasional gay man.
is r/popheadscirclejerk actually a snark forum, the question that will forever split haters studies into two camps…
haters but healthy haters
it depends on the pop star… i kind of think they were genuinely disappointed katy perry didn't die in that rocket lol
I do think once you leave Reddit it's a different story, but that might depend on how we parse the distinction of hater vs snarker. Whole chapters of hater studies really remain to be written…
I was just thinking about this re: r/foodiesnark. So many people lining up to hate on someone whose recipes they repeatedly make in their kitchens and put in their mouths. Maybe it's a weird form of intimacy that helps them feel like they're not in danger of collapsing into a bigger personality
I do often wonder how the divide between snarking and real life functions for the people who are actually like, fully employed lol. There's some influencer who occasionally mentions dealing with infertility and apparently her snarkers have tried to reverse engineer her cycle to prove she's lying? Like do you ever mention to the other people in your life that this is how you spend your free time or…
Read this title as “hat is parasocial” at first
All conversations with my hat are one sided, and only one of us paid to share this experience.
the lonesome hat