Metro

Saturday August 22, 2009

The heavy price of blog fame

Blogged Out by NICOLE TAN


HAVING been blogger for the past three years, I learnt that it only took a blogger (of increasing popularity) six months to understand the negativity power of “hate comments”, another six months to understand and embrace their existence and the rest of your blogging career to ignore them.

Now a hate comment is NOT a criticism.

A criticism is an evaluative but disapproving comment made by a reader based on his perceived faults or mistakes (of the blog) in the hope of establishing constructive suggestions, and hopefully possible future improvement.

But a hate comment is a comment made purely with the intention to defame and slander, sometimes even for personal amusement.

Rarely it contains reasons or grounds and mostly consists of offensive remarks and derogatory statements.

In other words, a hate comment is an unfair and unacceptable criticism.

By putting yourself out there (on your blog), it is your duty to anticipate negative remarks, regardless of your actions.

And I mean regardless.

You could be commenting that the weather is nice and your hater might just call you a bimbo.

Or you could be talking about walking your dog and someone would come in and announces that your dog is the ugliest dog ever.

Try talking about your relationship and people might accuse your boyfriend of having no taste in women.

They would then proceed to stalk and convince him why he shouldn’t be dating a bimbo like you because you own the ugliest dog in the world.

I’ve always shared some of my blog comments with friends and showed them that some of my loyal readers are often my devoted haters, too.

I used to have this one hater who would haunt and stalk me on my blog, other blogs, or just about wherever I was involved, just to throw spiteful remarks at me or about me.

She (yes, it’s a girl!) would come to my blog every two hours leaving meaningless comments on my blog to defame me, to denounce my fans (who also leave comments there), and even to insult anyone who reads my blog.

She even created several nicknames so as to create the illusion that more than one hater was vilifying me, forming a hate group among readers who share the same “passion” as her.

Before I knew it, they’ve created a haters forum on my blog’s commentary section to organise Nicolekiss’ haters gathering and meet-ups.

However, looking back the whole fiasco was rather hilarious.

In fact, it was a favourite joke among friends and a great ice breaker with strangers.

However, I have stopped taking all these too personally.

You see, haters are readers, too.

They do contribute to your readership daily, weekly, and even hourly!

Without them, you might not even enjoy popularity and most importanly, your blog income.

In truth, you should be worried if you don’t have any haters, assuming you claim yourself to be a popular blogger.

Once I was so elated to find that someone had created a hate blog on me named IHateNicolekiss.blogspot.com.

And I thought to myself, “Finally! I am going to be a true celebrity blogger!”

But alas, the creator of that blog decided to call it quits and abandoned the blog before the first post was published.

I can’t even begin to tell you how disappointed I was.

Sigh, there goes my fame.

Who knows, maybe, just maybe, I’ll be popular one day.

After all, IHateNicolekiss.com is still available.

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