Rock Candy Reviews

As a person who has been in fandom culture for her whole life, and who has been doing YouTube for three years, I believe that this is one of the worst times to be a content creator. Especially when your content revolves around critiquing entertainment.

In an era where it has become more acceptable to humiliate people who disagree with you on something, people are more inclined to harass and insult content creators in the cruelest way they can think of. Usually, in order to boost their esteem by seeing the likes pile up on their latest roast session.

Whether the attacks are based in facts or not, it can feel like people care more about how clever your delivery is, rather than if you are giving constructive feedback.

Despite the fact that I don’t even have enough subscribers to make money off my videos, I have experienced this with my own channel on YouTube. It’s really discouraging after putting effort into an analysis, just for someone to comment about how my voice annoys them instead of talking about the content of the video.

This can be also very hurtful when having prior experience with bullying and sensitivities to condescending behavior.

How do we deal with this?

Sometimes it’s not enough to say “it’s just another troll” or “just don’t reply”. Random personal attacks are jarring and still cause you distress. Even if you choose not to engage the commenter. Remember that you have a right to feel hurt by someone being rude to you. Taking time to step back and acknowledge how you feel can help you process the situation, and make better decisions on what to do next.

In terms of how it affects your work, here are some things I like to go over when someone leaves an unhelpful comment.

1. Random hate comments are not a reflection of how good your content is.

2. You don’t have to defend yourself to someone you’ll probably never meet in real life. Don’t stress over someone who doesn’t even know you personally.

3. The effort you put into expressing yourself in a non aggressive way is a skill in and of itself. (A skill the commenter clearly doesn’t have.)

4. Finding an audience that respects you enough to give helpful feedback takes time. A lot of time.

5. Disagreeing with someone is not the end of the world.

The only time these reminders don’t apply is if someone is repeatedly targeting you, or is actively threatening your safety. Tolerating things like stalking and death threats will only make the problem worse.

There will always be people who think it’s okay to make light of something they don’t understand. Unfortunately, many people can’t comprehend that everyone doesn’t have the same priorities as them. Which is why they think it’s fine to belittle people they see as insignificant or irrelevant. However, these people will never be able to engage in conversation in the way we need them to. So, there’s no need to concern yourself with resenting them or proving them wrong. They won’t understand, because they don’t want to. They just want to make fun of somebody.

Hopefully this helps ease your mind about haters being haters.