Jessica Grose: We're here to talk about hate-blogs. In my novel, Sad Desk Salad (shameless self promotion alert), the heroine and her coworkers at a women's website called Chick Habit are plagued by a hate-blogger who reblogs their posts and puts up incriminating, embarrassing personal information about them.

For those who aren't familiar with the phenomenon, hate-blogs are an actual thing. I based the hate-blog in my book (Breaking the Chick Habit, or BTCH) on the hate-blogs I had read up till then: The ones about Jezebel, the Pioneer Woman, and Julia Allison.

I asked you to join me in this chat because you’ve covered [...]

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Important Editor: I Hate The Internet But Love Trolling. What Do You Think?less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplySeth Colter Wallssethcolterwalls

"He just rolled up and trolled. He went into a venue where people have elected to be, and told everyone that their presence there makes them stupid. He then laments that he did not receive more positive responses from within that [...]

"[W]hat's the difference between a troll and somebody who just has very bad manners?"

The problem with making the Internet safe is that it would necessarily make the Internet the same. That's the reason Facebook creeps people out: it tries to impose a uniform user interface on the existing heterogeneous online experience to make it appear homogenous, and in so doing actually transform the culture into one where everything is the same. In an op-ed in today's Times, Julie Zhuo, a product design manager at Facebook, goes further, proposing that non-Facebook content providers standardize their approach to anonymous commenting to rid the Internet of trolls. (Or hey, maybe they could just use the Facebook commenting system!) But what would the Internet be [...]

Professional Internet troll Katie Roiphe has been on a tear! (If you missed her pre-Christmas salvo, "We Like Rapey Movies Because They Help All of Us to Keep Thinking Of Ourselves as Victims Even Though None of Us Actually Are, Because Rape Is So Vanishingly Rare," well, enjoy!) Now for the new year she's back, with a column called "Turning Off the Internet Is Impossible but Even Though We Actually Can, Thanks to Cool Tools, But Really It Is Illusory, Because Our Very Minds Are Different Now, and We Will Live Only Inside the Internet Forever"! It's actually a weird plea about human helplessness, or her own [...]

"Shortly after the St. Petersburg Times announced Mr. Smith's death on its website, a reader posted a comment stating the following: A man who is working as a dishwasher at the Crab Shack at the age of 48 is surely better off dead." Here's the corrective. (via)