I’ve treated Lemmy as a fun, silly blog since I made my account. I love how you can freely post anywhere and as much as you like, unlike on Reddit. I’m also a teen who grew up online with unrestricted internet access and does online school, so I’m a bit addicted to being online. I love how much more interactive the comments feel here, despite it being a smaller platform. I’ve had fun reading and interacting with people. But I think I might delete my account and everything, because people analyzing my behavior and accusing me of things has started to get to me. Most recently, someone accused me of trying to manipulate people because of my age and gender. All I wanted to do was make people feel some fun and giggles. I’m wondering if you’ve ever felt something similar.
It’s interesting how negative comments affect me so much more than positive ones. I’ve definitely received far more positive feedback during my time here, but for every 100 positive comments, that one negative one really sticks with me.
I have this trait irl. It’s good to know about it and even better to try to regulate it, because it makes life seem so much worse than it really is. I can see there are people who don’t have it this way and who just forget all the bad stuff almost immediately - must be nice.
I’m just asking out of curiosity: why do you think you care so much about the negative comments?
I am one of those people that shrug it off, and if I were to try to rationalize my emotional armor, I’d say that the places these matters of taste and disagreement come from, like psychologically, are often not you’re own fault and wouldn’t really be fixable even if you tried.
But, I wonder if that might be missing the mark. The futility of trying to appease people who are unappeasable might actually have nothing to do with it.
Not just comments, negative things in general. I think in my case it’s connected to a hereditary predisposition to depression and anxiety. The bad stuff makes a large impact and the good stuf just doesn’t seem to produce any neural pathways. It’s physiological. Some of my family got much better with modern antidepresants. I went a different way and I’m ok now as well, it took decades though.
It’s an anxiety thing; the actual name is “rejection sensitivity dysphoria”: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24099-rejection-sensitive-dysphoria-rsd
A lot of AuDHD people suffer it. Great example, I started a business and I’ve gotten 99% positive feedback on the product from dozens of people, but a handful of negative comments and two of my best friends didn’t like it, and I’ve actually considered giving up entirely because of that.
Which is insane. I love my product, I’m very happy with it… but my buddies not liking it makes me very sad on a whole bunch of levels.
Also I did delete my old account and comments, precisely because as MagicShel said above: it had existed long enough to be a liability. It’s not as big a deal here as on Reddit though, you can export your preferences and get back to the same subscriptions and blocks very easily on any new account!
I’ll also say that for people who experience that intentionally building up distress tolerance is super valuable
That’s the universal human experience. Listen to every marginally famous person and they will tell you that a single negative comment feels like it weighs more than 100 positive ones. Then factor in that people who disagree feel compelled to voice their opinion while those who agree often silently nod to themselves and move on. So the 100 positive comments are likely representative of 500 people who agree but don’t say anything.
So far, you seem to be doing well. Don’t let a couple of the haters get to you.
Of course, if a pattern appears of many comments criticizing the same thing, then you can think about if there’s something you should change about your behavior. But even then, the change should come from your own realization that you want to change something, not from a desire to appeal to the faceless mass of terminally online weirdos.
Yep. That is true for most people.
My guess: survival instinct. It’s the haters that will stab you when you’re not paying attention. Unless you’re famous being hated on the Internet is safe. But our brains are made for surviving in the wild, not the Internet.