I begin to understand

A minor musing on the ways and whimsies of the Internet:

I'm starting to get why trolls do their troll thing. It's coming to me, after having this particular poli-blog up for a few weeks now, and getting, well, pretty much the same amount of attention over here as I generally get over at the geek blog, which is to say, next to slim, and close to none. But that's incidental, or at least, secondary, to what I'm typing about presently.

Where true enlightenment lies for me in this regard is in watching how other poli bloggers routinely ignore my comments. I'd like to think it's personal, because that's exactly the kind of jerk I am, and I even suppose it could be, but believing that a bunch of unrelated utter strangers all have it in for me smacks of madness, and anyway, I keep changing up the pseuds I post under just to eliminate that factor. So it seems unlikely there's an agenda actually at work, loathe though I am to admit that.

Barring that, then, I have to assume they're just ignoring my comments, and responding to comments from other people in the threads... why?

I don't know why. At first and last, I can only speculate. I'm tempted to extract from this a general rule for commenting on blogs -- something like "Never be smarter, funnier, or a better writer than the blogger whose blog you are commenting on" -- but, well, that only works for petty insecure types like Aaron Hawkins, and I certainly hope that folks like Jim Henley and IOZ and Roy Edroso and Glenn Greenwald are above all that shit.

It could be that my comments just suck. In fact, the whole "I just suck" thing could explain why nobody pays much attention to my writing at all -- why no one comments on my blogs, why my short stories and novels all get rejected, why no one will believe a word I say about a certain big name pro telling pathological lies about me and his wife on the Internet. Yet here, clear cold analysis tells me that however badly I may suck, there are many, many others who suck much worse who still get much more attention than I do. So, again, that brings me back to -- why? Why do all my comments, regardless of the names I post them under, get routinely ignored by all the bloggers whose blogs I post them to? Why do cretins who can barely type get several hundred word responses?

Ultimately, I don't know, and no one is going to tell me, so to hell with it.

But it certainly lets me understand the troll mentality. No one likes to be ignored, and that certainly includes me -- and no one ever ignores a troll. Especially on the better read blogs. Because no matter how many people there are in the comment threads who understand that trolls thrive on attention (just like the rest of us) and therefore, the only way to deal with them is to ignore them, there is always some frickin' rookie who doesn't believe this, or who doesn't have the discipline to apply the wisdom, and who feels they just have to engage the fucker. Which is exactly what he or she wants, and is exactly why he or she trolls in the first place.

Now, I'm not going to start trolling. I'll continue to keep what comments I post on topic, and try to make them about the subject matter of the blog post, rather than what I perceive of the personality of the blogger. (On the other hand, if the subject matter of the blog post IS the personality and/or behavior of the blogger, well, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.) Still, I'm above trolling, and certainly am not so pathetically desperate for attention that I'm going to start leaping into the middle of someone's threads screaming personal abuse just to get a rise out of folks.

Unless it's a really slow day, or something.

But, you know, when you post all this really cool stuff, and nobody pays it the slightest mind... it just gets really exasperating.

I suppose it's really just that blogs tend to be cliqueish, and bloggers tend to focus their attention on the people they already know and like. That's probably the bulk of it, and it's very common, and very human. But, I think it's also lamentable, and limiting, and to what extent I can, it's a behavior I try to avoid. On the rare occasion I actually get comments from people outside the very small circle of my familiar audience, I try to give them just as much time and attention as I do the feedback from more familiar folks.

But, in this as in so many things, I seem to be an exception rather than the rule.

Of course, it's tough not to believe that in point of fact, what's going on here is, for whatever reason, few if any people like or welcome my comments on their blogs, and what they are doing is what nearly all civil, polite people do in such circumstances -- pointedly ignoring me until I go away. And eventually, I probably will. But I'm more obtuse than most people; I tend to need a more direct disinvitation before I sadly pick up my glove and ball and wend my dejected ass back home again.

It's not beyond possibility, of course, that my reputation has preceded me, that these people recognize my singular signature style regardless of how I actually sign myself, and none of them want a damn thing to do with "Kurt Busiek's psycho stalker". In which case, well, fine, I'll own that; I earned it, and I'll take it. I just wish they'd tell me, if not least because, I could then ridicule them savagely for it on my blogs.

Ah, well.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled political ravings, already in progress, most likely.