★ Regarding my “ego” and Negative Criticism

Too often am I “pissing off” people for being thin skinned and overreacting but I think it’s time to address this. Once a day, I block, delete, remove and mark as spam someone that I know online or offline. I do this for a few reasons and I’ve intentionally configured my online life to make this very easy.

I started using the web when I was around 12 years old. I had a GeoCities home page, chatted in AOL Chat rooms and engaged in conversations in message boards. All three of those mediums were public, open and moderating those mediums was, for the most part, out of my control. I wasn’t doing anything wrong and only expressing myself like I do now but back then, I lacked the tools to filter out noise. Spam filtering was non-existent, message board hate couldn’t be filtered or deleted by me and when someone sent me hateful AIM messages, there wasn’t a block tool. I’ve dealt with it but luckily, social networks make blocking someone very easy.

For years, I always wanted everyone to like me online. As my popularity increased, I still responded to every hateful message and would spend hours trying to prove my intentions and get them to like me. I still do this with some people but what I learned is the Internet is simplye High School 2.0. Bullies pick on you and steal your lunch money and if you fight back or ignore it, they come back again and again. In high school, you couldn’t change shools or have that kid expelled but on social networks, you can put up a brick wall around you when that person is around.

I live a very public life but I don’t live this life for YOU. I do it for myelf because I’m writing a story. My story is for me and my future generations. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Last.FM, Digg and more are all parts of me and I want to capsulate those one day and pass it on to my son or daughter so they knew exactly what kind of person I was and what experiences I enjoyed. The added benefit of real time feedback and collaboration that the Internet provides is icing on the cake.

Experiencing Internet bullying for over a decade, I’ve learned that bullies will keep bullying until you block them or get them banned from that network. Ignoring it doesn’t work because they know you saw the comment, email, tweet and reply. Responding to it only gets them more interested. They want you to respond.

When a person bullies me once, they’ll probably do it again so I don’t offer anyone a second chance to piss me off and that’s why blocking / unfriending is so common to me. Criticism is one thing but only if it’s constructive. There are guys who I was friends with offline who I took the time to reply to their bullying publicly but everytime, I end up looking like an idiot and they come back a week later to do it again.

Yesterday, I made a tweet about Apple and AT&T’s decision to charge $500 in order to get a new iPhone 3Gs. Someone who I knew replied back calling my complaining lame. I simply blocked that person and this pissed them off. So what? That’s actually the 3rd time that person has sent something like that and I don’t have time to debate or ignore their messages.

A week ago, a person who I know offline and continue to be friends with told me that I’m being a typical web 2.0 kid when I bitched about Twitter and the brokenness of Trending topics. I just blocked her because i wasn’t complaining about Twitter as a service but the change in the community has made trending topics useless to me which is a solid fact. This is the 2nd time she’s sent me negative (non-constructive) criticism.

The 3rd person, in my memory was someone who replied to my tweets about using  windows saying, “you’re a fucking loser for using Windows.” This is a person that I’ve known for over 6 years and worked with on different projects. I blocked him and added his email to my spam folder in Outlook.

Every day something like this happens. If the first person had said to me, “I think you’re missing the point and here’s why…” I would have listened to her feedback, debated a bit and saw her side as well but calling my comment “lame” is rude and I consider it bullying.

She later emailed me saying I need to have thicker skin but that’s not the point. I shouldn’t have to get thicker skin just because you feel it’s in your best interest to take time and call me lame. You should be respectufl, kind and thoughtful enough to be positive and offer your opinion without making me feel like an idiot. If I read someone’s comment and feel like an idiot for the tweet I just made and not see a smidgin of constructive criticism, that’s considered bullying and you’re blocked. We can still be friends in real life but I receive enough negative feedback to simply block people instead of dealing with their “crap”

This is my explanation on why I block so many people and I won’t be explaining myself again.