After all of this, I'm sort of at that point of deleting a few social media accounts. Because places like reddit, youtube, and even facebook are just so full of negativity, and I have a personality that is confrontational. So I basically come on places like reddit just to get angry and frustrated and read other people be angry and frustrated. And then people I really really like get shit on for no good reason.

I don't really want to be a part of this kind of optional culture anymore. It's hard to eliminate it completely, but dropping Reddit and modding Youtube to not display comments is probably what I personally have to do to not get frustrated pretty much every day I have time to "be online".

I'm lucky in that I can more or less work at ignoring tons of disgusting and negative stuff that gets thrown around online. I'm more or less anonymous, I don't have a following, I'm not famous nor does anyone send me hundreds or thousands of messages a week or a day asking things of me. It's easy for me to "grow thick skin" because I can just remove all of the things that would force me to desensitize myself.

Nichole isn't in that position. She's nice and wants to be friendly to everybody because she's a great person. She wanted to reach out to as many other nice people as she could, but to do that means to expose yourself to a lot of bad people. It's so ridiculous to see people, nobodies who sit there in their armchairs, tell a person like that to grow thick skin and ignore all of the bad stuff while acknowledging just the good parts. That's infinitely more difficult than any random asshole who nobody cares about, who doesn't get thousands upon thousands of messages, who have thousands of people who get on your case the moment you distance yourself from a community in any way, could fathom. She doesn't get to be this person most of us admire and this invulnerable and nebulous anonymous entity with "thick skin" and the ability to ignore insane people attacking her. And at this point, it's not just ignoring a mean comment; someone has enough information about her to actually make specific and credible threats toward her and her loved ones. You can't grow thick skin for that. You can't blow that off like it's just "the internet"

So with all of that in mind, I think it's time for me to walk away from being a member of any online community too. I haven't been hurt like Nichole has, I haven't been abused like she has, I haven't had genuine threats that have scared me away. But I do realize that my interactions online, with anonymous people like people on reddit, actually make me more upset than happy. It passes the time, and at best I don't come away feeling angry. That's a shitty way to pass time if you ask me. And I know none of you know who I am, nor does any of this affect you, so I'm not posting this for you, reader. I just needed a place to write my thoughts and a word doc wasn't open. Cya.