My translucent lifestyle didn’t really start until I got Twitter back in 2006 despite blogging and sharing really personal data online since I was 13. Why did I share so much? Honestly, I found it interesting to get feedback from people and learn what they thought. Most of the time, critical feedback was positive and uplifting and the same people also gave supportive comments that proved extremely valuable.
My first hater came in 2003 in the form a guy who profits from the Mac community with events and a blog. I was a “fanboy” of his site and content and because of my commitment to help, he found it necessary to threaten me publicly by saying, “I’m going to shoot you, rip off your head and take a shit down your throat.” I’ve tried to make amends with him but he still talks shit about me to this day. The story is longer but I’ve told it before so you can search the interwebs for that one.
After Twitter and moving to San Francisco to do this “Internet thing” as a profession, the number of people that hate me online has grown. To this day, no one hates me in person aside from that first guy who wasn’t hiding at all. Now, it’s just anonymous hate from all angles. I receive hundreds of replies, emails, comments and calls every week that are supportive. Only once every two weeks does someone say something to me negative and usually it’s pretty harmless.
That brief chapter in my life known as AdamsBlock accelerated the hate for a moment but it has leveled out since taking that camera offline in December. That incident was pretty scary at the time. The pushback was still in the single digits and compared to the people that were supportive, the haters stayed at around 5% compared to 95% positive. That’s mostly why I was able to ignore it. If the hate hit double-digits, it would be time to rethink if what I was doing was actually a bad thing.
Haters don’t actually bother me. I can deal with it. If you’re a guy in Nebraska with some time to kill on a Tuesday night, you find my blog and disagree with my stance on health care and leave an anonymous comment, that’s fine. Honestly, I’d like for you to say that though. What does bother me is that I have a very large network of “friends” I see on a monthly basis at events, meetings and conferences and I always wonder if it’s someone that I know.
Some comments are personal things that only a few people would know about. So which of the 10 people that know about this specific thing be hurtful enough to reply to me from some anonymous account when they could have just called me. I think that’s the only thing that bothers me. As much as I share online, there’s still so much that I don’t share. This not only keeps me safe but also because sharing everything is too time consuming.
Now that everyone knows where I stand on this, I’d like to say that I’ve started embracing the haters. Sharing responsibly is important because when someone has “dirt” on me, their hate can be a lot more powerful. If I told you that I had HIV (which I don’t), I’d win a ton of support from people who were affected by HIV and the support would be terrific. You all would really help me get through it but there would be that single digit percentage that would use it to throw shit at me about my sex life, or somehow guess that I’m bisexual and say I should, “stop going to orgys with dudes” and more useless hate.
So there has to be a line drawn. At what point do you share in order to gain support or don’t share in order to not put fuel on the fire by giving out info that can be used to hurt you.
Some would say that’s what friends are for. When something is happening in your life, share it with a close friend, get advice and support and feel better by having a human connection and not a virtual connection. Yes, I completely agree but for some of the people that say that, you may have not truly realized the value of crowd-sourced support.
By telling over 5000 people that I lost my job, I’m able to get my resume out there within 5 minutes and land a new job quickly. Of the huge network that knows I was laid off, 5 people might respond back that I’m a broke ass loser who can’t hold a job. Yeah, it’s hurtful but without dealing with that, I now have to manually apply to hundreds of jobs in order to get one and you know that being referred to a job is much more valuable than sending in a resume blindly to a company. In that case, I chose to be public.
This value greatly exceeds the loss of giving people more crap to throw at me. Sharing selectively has been my goal ever since AdamsBlock happened. Share less, more often which results for a lot of unusable information like linking to a news story or a funny video. This info isn’t leveraged for hate and only serves as filler for the really important stuff.
The latest, somewhat harmless hate is in the form of another anonymous Twitter account. The account known as “Fake Adam Jackson” is certainly doing their best to mock my extremely boring tweets. I give them some credit for trying. The content of that account is mild which is either because the person on the other side is making an effort to be civil and have some fun or because my goal of not giving anyone enough meaningful info about me to truly do any damage.
There was another account that replied to me over a month ago at random that I have blocked. Here’s a screen-grab of that tweet. That tweet came out of nowhere and I don’t know why they even thought this. We were living together at the time and it was just someone screwing with me. Like I said, these are mostly harmless but a group of people are really wasting their time and not mine.
You can checkout Fake Adam Jackson on Twitter [LINK]
I do encourage you read my previous posts on “anonymity” on the web [link]
Those that have followed my blog since 2001-2002 that I still interact with today know that I’ve changed things a lot. Even the past year has seen big changes to what I share online. That’s how it will have to be from now on. Most of you that truly care and are supportive get less meaningful info but I still focus on sharing enough so that it’s interesting. This is the new way I have to live. Almost all of you are supportive and I thank you for that.