The problem that you're getting at, unfortunately, seems to be very common and I've seen other writers mention it. A certain sub-section of "readers" will simply glance at a piece, note the author's name (thereby assuming they know what tribe she, or he belongs to), pick out a few key words and then dash off a sloppy response based on what they think was said. This is not an issue of reading comprehension and no amount of dumbing down your prose will fix it. It's an issue of skimming or bad faith reading.
I enjoy your posts (obviously, since I pay for access) so please don't dumb them down. The haters, idiots, and bad faith actors will always be around and there's not a lot to be done about them except ignoring them.
Three thoughts leapt immediately to mind when I read this. The first was the now-famous Jordan Peterson Channel 4 interview where his interlocutor persisted in wildly misrepresenting and misunderstanding what he was saying. The second immediate reaction was to recall Flannery O'Connor's observation that the best time for a writer is when she has finished her work, but before it is published and "begins to be misunderstood". (That made me laugh really hard the first time I read it.)
Lastly, I did read your piece on talent, and if you really have readers who perceived an aspersion on their "identity as a gifted child", well, their evident difficulty with reading comprehension does give cause to wonder how they acquired such an "identity" in the first place.
Substack creates an incentive for quick reaction in order to get to the top of the comment pile. So I think a lot of people don’t read the whole thing, or at best skim. But I think you’re also correct - people are getting dumber because of these habits. I am a bibliophile and fond of sharing books I love, but I hardly bother anymore. Even when people say they are interested, they don’t actually read the books. No one “has time” now.
I know what you mean. It took awhile but I did manage to get myself back into reading paper books. And I hesitate to recommend them, for the same reasons you mention.
I have noticed that there are Substacks where I read carefully and every word, and others that I skim. But I would never comment on the latter. That’s part of what blows me away — imagine commenting on something you skimmed! Like WTF.
"Maybe writing that tries to braid personal experience, cultural critique, and practical advice all together in the same piece is doomed to be misread by definition—because it asks too much."
Yes.
Welcome to life - have a nice day.
Dostoyevsky and Dickens didn't have an immediate feedback loop from a "comment section". There's a reason the first advice from every Generation One internet writer is " don't read the comments".
Exactly! There are a lot of people out there with borderline personality disorder. One common trait is to relate everything to themselves. Another is to have a bias toward negative assessments. They are known for ’relationship chaos’. They see the world full of problems and blame everyone else. They have the emotional intelligence of a toddler. They can be obsessively online. Here is a fascinating list of traits, just a few of which can cause what you describe. https://www.taraforboderlinepersonalitydisorder.org/valerieattaragmailcom
Obviously you wrote this piece to attack me, personally, alone. Again. First, you denied that I have talent that makes me special and accused me of laziness; and now you accuse me of hallucinating all the time. Well, you won't get me to cancel my subscription that way, let me tell you! I might have to buy a print just to prove to you how wrong you are, actually.
Once in a while I’ll get an email regarding someone who has chosen to follow me. It will say something like “User xxx follows Mindless Drivel and 942 other Substacks.” Even if every one of those followed writers publishes only once a month, it’s almost certain that they aren’t paying for subscription, and probably not reading any of them in depth. I think maybe the goal is to scan headlines in search of something that they can disagree with. No thinking is involved, and you’re absolutely right about the lack of it these days. They look at posts as a game - “Prove the author wrong!” Someone who is stupid, or more likely, becoming stupid for the exact reasons you’ve stated, is just looking for a way to feel smart without much effort. Side note - I’m glad the Doxycycline worked with your Lyme disease. One of my sons got it from a tick bite on a camping trip 40 years ago. It was unknown here, and a mystery to every one of the many doctors who saw him. The lead physician kept him on an antibiotic IV, which eventually resolved it, but most of the cartilage in one hip was destroyed by the bacteria. He has had bone on bone pain for many years, and will eventually need a hip replacement.
It’s always been this way. The platform on which you publish has no gatekeepers (except the block and mute buttons), unlike previous mediums, where published replies were carefully chosen by editors.
People aren’t (on average) all that bright and as Substack has now become the site everyone and his mother’s best friend is currently using … well, more isn’t always better.
(I think adding “Notes” to this site was brilliant for business, because it increased engagement and revenue, but terrible for content. It lured the trolls, the bot like engagement farming and the grifters.)
Anyway, back to your lament about how stupid comments are …
You are too young to remember Phil Donahue and peak Oprah, but these shows pandered to the stupid and created the notion that there was “wisdom” in the average audience member that was the equivalent of whatever the subject under discussion. (Josh might remember.)
Pandering to her audience of 50 million (yes, those were her numbers) per week made Oprah a billionaire. But it also created the culture she no longer understands—the one where everyone, no matter how stupid, rude or muddled, truly believes that what they say should be heard and considered on the same level as a person who is trained, educated and experienced. (And this does not necessarily mean credentialed, nor does it preclude it.)
It’s the sea in which you swim. Everything is chum to someone.
This makes a lot of sense. I imagine that very few comments would get through some kind of gatekeeper the way that it used to be with newspapers or whatever. Thanks.
I think Jerry Springer was infinitely more self-aware than O and PD! He is definitely a co-creator of the current culture, but like one from the poor side of the family! (He’s serving up snails on a plate and not calling it escargot.)
Every once in a while, a rant is required to clear the mind of accumulated dreck. I usually let it loose outside where only the birds and the squirrels hear it. Or driving around town with the ac on and windows closed. (There goes that crazy old man again.)
Enjoy the Fourth, and have a quiet, productive week.
One of your best moves was to get off Twitter. In the same vein, mine was FaceBook. Things were getting so vile and personal and even involved members of my own family!
Your grain of salt moment about comments actually hit me likely before you were even born. As a teacher, you would too frequently hear another teacher say "I saw Johnny going into your classroom. He is the worst nightmare a teacher can have. He is dumb, he misbehaves frequently and you will be constantly sending him to the office. Oh, and the same goes for Billy, Tommy, Susie, Chuck and Sam." Well brighten my day "friend"! When I got those comments, I usually allowed them to enter the left ear and very quickly exit the right ear. I prefer to form my own opinion. Some teachers are more sensitive than others (and sometimes not in a beneficial way) and some live in fear (definitely not beneficial). Leave me alone in my classroom and let me work with a student and see what he/she can and will do. Maybe I would agree with Ms. Debbie Downer but usually I found a way to get some positives out of the student. Usually, but definitely not always. The "prize" for doing that was that some colleagues were able to get the problem students removed from their classes and put in mine! I was usually up for a challenge. The rewards were great seeing the smile on the student's face when you passed back that quiz with a big 95 or 100 on the top. I was the one who didn't mark things wrong when I graded. I checked what was correct so a paper bleeding red in my class was the mark of success! Students who came to my class for the first time told me that teachers weren't supposed to do that. All I could say was "Why not?"
1) Some people just skim or even just read the title and respond. And, yes, this is probably a Bad Social Media thing, in part, but has been around before that.
2) Some people are just stupid. Or unpleasant people who like disagreeing. Or stupid unpleasant people, even. These aren't necessarily subscribers.
3) Beyond this, yes, we probably are suffering comprehension and attention issues from social media and the sheer amount of "content" (I hate that word) out there.
4) I used to write in a similar genre to you (not on Substack). It relies not just on having good content, but on having an engaging style and letting your personality through. That probably limits the number of people who will read it and understand it. It also makes criticism feel more personal than if you were writing something more abstract.
5) You should absolutely write for those who can still read like this. The Medieval Jewish philosopher Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (known to Jews as Rambam and Westerners as Maimonides) wrote in the introduction to his opus, The Guide for the Perplexed, that if a thousand people would misunderstand something he wrote, but one person would understand and have his intellectual questions resolved, he would write for the one person. Writing of this kind is deeply personal, to your readers as well as your writers. That makes it unique and worth putting out there (IMHO).
On the talents as well as this post, I believe that we all have some kind of firewalls in our brains. Not the kind you are necessarily born with but the kind that is a defensive mechanism to thwart self-imposed limitations. One of my firewalls is with artistic talent. I love organ and piano music. I could listen to it for hours on end (and frequently do) as well as finding a duo who play multiple instruments, film and one is also a cartoonist. I took piano lessons as a child. Can play the melody of some hymns and a rousing chorus of chopsticks. Beyond that, my talent is listening to great music (I love the old masters and realize that like the great literary masters, these people are likely a dying breed--after all, how many people have said that Shakespeare has been dead for centuries so why read him?).
Maybe the firewalls are covering for perfectionists. Maybe not. I do believe we all have talents. Some are lucky enough to be multi-talented. Some only have one self-acknowledged talent but actually possess more talents. Like my husband says "the world would be a boring place if everyone only wanted vanilla" and I believe him!
As a musician, there are two ways I see this play out:
1.” I’m tone deaf—I can’t play/sing/do music at all.”
I really don’t believe tone deafness exists, at least for about 90% of people insisting they are. They can train their voice to match pitch—or train their ear to recognize when they’re playing an instrument out of tune—it’s a skill that one can learn with consistent practice!
2. “XYZ is such a talented musician! I could never do that.”
XYZ is, from the perspective of other musicians, someone who can play about 4 chords on their instrument, whose melodies are exceedingly simple and predictable, but it’s their delivery that is the truly exceptional aspect of their art—not their musical skill, which is entirely rudimentary and which you, with dedication, could easily achieve.
Musicians are successful or accomplished because they PRACTICE. Every day, for a lifetime. Whatever natural musical ability a person has will likely come to nothing without practice—and often it’s the hard workers who love it enough to keep trying who become successful musicians.
One of the Ten Commandments of Logic: Thou shalt not misrepresent or exaggerate a person's argument in order to make it easier to attack. (Straw man fallacy).
I don't know if these are people who are just looking for a reason to be offended or if they have a purely superficial way of taking in writing.
If you can emotionally handle it, you should double down and make the fools get even more upset with the alternate reality arguments that you aren't making.
As I read through this post something kept tickling the back of my brain - let’s call that brain part the stupidcampus. Since the advent of postmodernism in the teaching of literature we have been trained to react ideologically. So it is ideologically correct or it ain’t. That’s way too simple. It actually takes years to learn how to interpret literature. In my freshman English class at Columbia in 1960 we read Swift’s A Modest Proposal which satirically puts forward the notion of solving the problem of famine by eating excess Irish babies. Two of us in the class got it, and the prof hushed us so as to let the deluded bray on and on. Those were smart kids - some of them with perfect SAT scores. Two years later, as Juniors, I noticed they were writing better papers than I was. Later, I encountered a literature teacher who informed me that Harry Potter was a “class enemy” and assured me that because he was a professor of literature he understood these things. Well….. “Bless his heart!” The problem is that despite a real education in Literature and the Arts I get sucked into ideological thinking too - like most of us. Part of it is that virtual media environments lack body language, facial expression, and a host of other subtle tells like where true attention is directed. But part of it is lack of learning to appreciate, much less value, nuance. How would this quote from Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice go on Twitter? "There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost every attachment that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all begin freely ― a slight preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement." Oh dear, it just breaks a disabled brain with ‘comprehension deficit disorder’ to cope with such. So I scan YouTube hypersensitive to the ideological spin of most of the content and increasingly don’t watch any of it. That Holly’s brain noticeably changed because she quit X shows that the media we use have a much bigger effect on us that we tend to notice. For me, McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message”, asks us to consider taking our attention off the ‘red meat of content’ and consider how the medium itself changes how our minds work.
I'm going to close the comments at 8am Eastern on Monday, June 30, because of what's in the Personal Update. Which probably nobody read. LMAO.
Open again until Tuesday morning.
The problem that you're getting at, unfortunately, seems to be very common and I've seen other writers mention it. A certain sub-section of "readers" will simply glance at a piece, note the author's name (thereby assuming they know what tribe she, or he belongs to), pick out a few key words and then dash off a sloppy response based on what they think was said. This is not an issue of reading comprehension and no amount of dumbing down your prose will fix it. It's an issue of skimming or bad faith reading.
I enjoy your posts (obviously, since I pay for access) so please don't dumb them down. The haters, idiots, and bad faith actors will always be around and there's not a lot to be done about them except ignoring them.
Thank you; this means a lot. And your explanation is quite plausible.
Like Jesus said, “The poor (of intellect) will always be with us.”
Three thoughts leapt immediately to mind when I read this. The first was the now-famous Jordan Peterson Channel 4 interview where his interlocutor persisted in wildly misrepresenting and misunderstanding what he was saying. The second immediate reaction was to recall Flannery O'Connor's observation that the best time for a writer is when she has finished her work, but before it is published and "begins to be misunderstood". (That made me laugh really hard the first time I read it.)
Lastly, I did read your piece on talent, and if you really have readers who perceived an aspersion on their "identity as a gifted child", well, their evident difficulty with reading comprehension does give cause to wonder how they acquired such an "identity" in the first place.
Substack creates an incentive for quick reaction in order to get to the top of the comment pile. So I think a lot of people don’t read the whole thing, or at best skim. But I think you’re also correct - people are getting dumber because of these habits. I am a bibliophile and fond of sharing books I love, but I hardly bother anymore. Even when people say they are interested, they don’t actually read the books. No one “has time” now.
I know what you mean. It took awhile but I did manage to get myself back into reading paper books. And I hesitate to recommend them, for the same reasons you mention.
I have noticed that there are Substacks where I read carefully and every word, and others that I skim. But I would never comment on the latter. That’s part of what blows me away — imagine commenting on something you skimmed! Like WTF.
"Maybe writing that tries to braid personal experience, cultural critique, and practical advice all together in the same piece is doomed to be misread by definition—because it asks too much."
Yes.
Welcome to life - have a nice day.
Dostoyevsky and Dickens didn't have an immediate feedback loop from a "comment section". There's a reason the first advice from every Generation One internet writer is " don't read the comments".
Ma'am. You are a fantastic writer. Most people are just not good readers anymore.
Exactly! There are a lot of people out there with borderline personality disorder. One common trait is to relate everything to themselves. Another is to have a bias toward negative assessments. They are known for ’relationship chaos’. They see the world full of problems and blame everyone else. They have the emotional intelligence of a toddler. They can be obsessively online. Here is a fascinating list of traits, just a few of which can cause what you describe. https://www.taraforboderlinepersonalitydisorder.org/valerieattaragmailcom
Obviously you wrote this piece to attack me, personally, alone. Again. First, you denied that I have talent that makes me special and accused me of laziness; and now you accuse me of hallucinating all the time. Well, you won't get me to cancel my subscription that way, let me tell you! I might have to buy a print just to prove to you how wrong you are, actually.
Have a productive week and a Glorious Fourth.
🤣🤣🤣 it is rare that I spew Coke zero out of my face laughing, and rarer still before 7 AM. Thank you!
Once in a while I’ll get an email regarding someone who has chosen to follow me. It will say something like “User xxx follows Mindless Drivel and 942 other Substacks.” Even if every one of those followed writers publishes only once a month, it’s almost certain that they aren’t paying for subscription, and probably not reading any of them in depth. I think maybe the goal is to scan headlines in search of something that they can disagree with. No thinking is involved, and you’re absolutely right about the lack of it these days. They look at posts as a game - “Prove the author wrong!” Someone who is stupid, or more likely, becoming stupid for the exact reasons you’ve stated, is just looking for a way to feel smart without much effort. Side note - I’m glad the Doxycycline worked with your Lyme disease. One of my sons got it from a tick bite on a camping trip 40 years ago. It was unknown here, and a mystery to every one of the many doctors who saw him. The lead physician kept him on an antibiotic IV, which eventually resolved it, but most of the cartilage in one hip was destroyed by the bacteria. He has had bone on bone pain for many years, and will eventually need a hip replacement.
Holly -
It’s always been this way. The platform on which you publish has no gatekeepers (except the block and mute buttons), unlike previous mediums, where published replies were carefully chosen by editors.
People aren’t (on average) all that bright and as Substack has now become the site everyone and his mother’s best friend is currently using … well, more isn’t always better.
(I think adding “Notes” to this site was brilliant for business, because it increased engagement and revenue, but terrible for content. It lured the trolls, the bot like engagement farming and the grifters.)
Anyway, back to your lament about how stupid comments are …
You are too young to remember Phil Donahue and peak Oprah, but these shows pandered to the stupid and created the notion that there was “wisdom” in the average audience member that was the equivalent of whatever the subject under discussion. (Josh might remember.)
Pandering to her audience of 50 million (yes, those were her numbers) per week made Oprah a billionaire. But it also created the culture she no longer understands—the one where everyone, no matter how stupid, rude or muddled, truly believes that what they say should be heard and considered on the same level as a person who is trained, educated and experienced. (And this does not necessarily mean credentialed, nor does it preclude it.)
It’s the sea in which you swim. Everything is chum to someone.
This makes a lot of sense. I imagine that very few comments would get through some kind of gatekeeper the way that it used to be with newspapers or whatever. Thanks.
Many of the Phil and Oprah followers also followed Jerry Springer. Guess they needed lots of spits (of coke early in the morning) and giggles!
I think Jerry Springer was infinitely more self-aware than O and PD! He is definitely a co-creator of the current culture, but like one from the poor side of the family! (He’s serving up snails on a plate and not calling it escargot.)
Every once in a while, a rant is required to clear the mind of accumulated dreck. I usually let it loose outside where only the birds and the squirrels hear it. Or driving around town with the ac on and windows closed. (There goes that crazy old man again.)
Enjoy the Fourth, and have a quiet, productive week.
One of your best moves was to get off Twitter. In the same vein, mine was FaceBook. Things were getting so vile and personal and even involved members of my own family!
Your grain of salt moment about comments actually hit me likely before you were even born. As a teacher, you would too frequently hear another teacher say "I saw Johnny going into your classroom. He is the worst nightmare a teacher can have. He is dumb, he misbehaves frequently and you will be constantly sending him to the office. Oh, and the same goes for Billy, Tommy, Susie, Chuck and Sam." Well brighten my day "friend"! When I got those comments, I usually allowed them to enter the left ear and very quickly exit the right ear. I prefer to form my own opinion. Some teachers are more sensitive than others (and sometimes not in a beneficial way) and some live in fear (definitely not beneficial). Leave me alone in my classroom and let me work with a student and see what he/she can and will do. Maybe I would agree with Ms. Debbie Downer but usually I found a way to get some positives out of the student. Usually, but definitely not always. The "prize" for doing that was that some colleagues were able to get the problem students removed from their classes and put in mine! I was usually up for a challenge. The rewards were great seeing the smile on the student's face when you passed back that quiz with a big 95 or 100 on the top. I was the one who didn't mark things wrong when I graded. I checked what was correct so a paper bleeding red in my class was the mark of success! Students who came to my class for the first time told me that teachers weren't supposed to do that. All I could say was "Why not?"
1) Some people just skim or even just read the title and respond. And, yes, this is probably a Bad Social Media thing, in part, but has been around before that.
2) Some people are just stupid. Or unpleasant people who like disagreeing. Or stupid unpleasant people, even. These aren't necessarily subscribers.
3) Beyond this, yes, we probably are suffering comprehension and attention issues from social media and the sheer amount of "content" (I hate that word) out there.
4) I used to write in a similar genre to you (not on Substack). It relies not just on having good content, but on having an engaging style and letting your personality through. That probably limits the number of people who will read it and understand it. It also makes criticism feel more personal than if you were writing something more abstract.
5) You should absolutely write for those who can still read like this. The Medieval Jewish philosopher Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (known to Jews as Rambam and Westerners as Maimonides) wrote in the introduction to his opus, The Guide for the Perplexed, that if a thousand people would misunderstand something he wrote, but one person would understand and have his intellectual questions resolved, he would write for the one person. Writing of this kind is deeply personal, to your readers as well as your writers. That makes it unique and worth putting out there (IMHO).
On the talents as well as this post, I believe that we all have some kind of firewalls in our brains. Not the kind you are necessarily born with but the kind that is a defensive mechanism to thwart self-imposed limitations. One of my firewalls is with artistic talent. I love organ and piano music. I could listen to it for hours on end (and frequently do) as well as finding a duo who play multiple instruments, film and one is also a cartoonist. I took piano lessons as a child. Can play the melody of some hymns and a rousing chorus of chopsticks. Beyond that, my talent is listening to great music (I love the old masters and realize that like the great literary masters, these people are likely a dying breed--after all, how many people have said that Shakespeare has been dead for centuries so why read him?).
Maybe the firewalls are covering for perfectionists. Maybe not. I do believe we all have talents. Some are lucky enough to be multi-talented. Some only have one self-acknowledged talent but actually possess more talents. Like my husband says "the world would be a boring place if everyone only wanted vanilla" and I believe him!
As a musician, there are two ways I see this play out:
1.” I’m tone deaf—I can’t play/sing/do music at all.”
I really don’t believe tone deafness exists, at least for about 90% of people insisting they are. They can train their voice to match pitch—or train their ear to recognize when they’re playing an instrument out of tune—it’s a skill that one can learn with consistent practice!
2. “XYZ is such a talented musician! I could never do that.”
XYZ is, from the perspective of other musicians, someone who can play about 4 chords on their instrument, whose melodies are exceedingly simple and predictable, but it’s their delivery that is the truly exceptional aspect of their art—not their musical skill, which is entirely rudimentary and which you, with dedication, could easily achieve.
Musicians are successful or accomplished because they PRACTICE. Every day, for a lifetime. Whatever natural musical ability a person has will likely come to nothing without practice—and often it’s the hard workers who love it enough to keep trying who become successful musicians.
One of the Ten Commandments of Logic: Thou shalt not misrepresent or exaggerate a person's argument in order to make it easier to attack. (Straw man fallacy).
I don't know if these are people who are just looking for a reason to be offended or if they have a purely superficial way of taking in writing.
If you can emotionally handle it, you should double down and make the fools get even more upset with the alternate reality arguments that you aren't making.
Anyway, I love your writing. Keep on keeping on!
As I read through this post something kept tickling the back of my brain - let’s call that brain part the stupidcampus. Since the advent of postmodernism in the teaching of literature we have been trained to react ideologically. So it is ideologically correct or it ain’t. That’s way too simple. It actually takes years to learn how to interpret literature. In my freshman English class at Columbia in 1960 we read Swift’s A Modest Proposal which satirically puts forward the notion of solving the problem of famine by eating excess Irish babies. Two of us in the class got it, and the prof hushed us so as to let the deluded bray on and on. Those were smart kids - some of them with perfect SAT scores. Two years later, as Juniors, I noticed they were writing better papers than I was. Later, I encountered a literature teacher who informed me that Harry Potter was a “class enemy” and assured me that because he was a professor of literature he understood these things. Well….. “Bless his heart!” The problem is that despite a real education in Literature and the Arts I get sucked into ideological thinking too - like most of us. Part of it is that virtual media environments lack body language, facial expression, and a host of other subtle tells like where true attention is directed. But part of it is lack of learning to appreciate, much less value, nuance. How would this quote from Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice go on Twitter? "There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost every attachment that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all begin freely ― a slight preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement." Oh dear, it just breaks a disabled brain with ‘comprehension deficit disorder’ to cope with such. So I scan YouTube hypersensitive to the ideological spin of most of the content and increasingly don’t watch any of it. That Holly’s brain noticeably changed because she quit X shows that the media we use have a much bigger effect on us that we tend to notice. For me, McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message”, asks us to consider taking our attention off the ‘red meat of content’ and consider how the medium itself changes how our minds work.