Saturday, June 02, 2007

RE: Anonymous hate-commenter

You know that you must be doing something right when you get your first hate-comments on your blog. My post about the bad things in Brussels (City of Sirens) got a lot of comments on other blogs, but they weren't hateful. But now, after 1,5 years of writing this blog and 30 visitors per day I finally got a hate-comment. Here's what an anonymous hater said as a comment on my last post:

please can somebody stop this blog!
yerk off to your self ugly man


Now that's not very nice, is it? Let's analyse this piece of copy. I think the writer doesn't know me personally, I can see that at the text 'ugly man', which is quite a neutral way of adressing somebody. He (let's say it's a man)is for sure NOT a copywriter, or at least not a good one. I can see that first of all by the spelling mistakes he manages to make in only two sentences. 'your self' should be one word: 'yourself', and 'yerk' should be written with a 'j'.

But the main problem is that the text has no arguments at all. After 'please can somebody stop this blog' there should be an argument why somebody should stop my blog. Instead of doing that he uses swear words. But he's got a point, I do tend to draw a lot of attention to myself. I don't consider myself really ugly, but that's a matter of taste.

Let's see how he could have written this better. Mr. anynymous could have written for example the following:

Come on, this is the second time you brag about making so much campaigns.
If you're so good, where's your award?


Ouch! With a line like this the anonymous writer could have shown that he actually did some research. He would also have found a weakness of mine which is the fact that I didn't won any awards in the 1,5 year I'm in the Miami Ad School. The only thing I could say about that is that I'm working on it. Another version could be:

This blog should be called: journey of a self-wanker
He probably left his modesty in Hamburg when he went to Stockholm


Again, the research part. But the strenght of this sentence is in the sarcasm. It says the same as the old sentence, but in a wittier and sharper way. This way you can convince the people who already thought I was talking too much about myself (there must be a lot of them ;-). Let's have another go at slaughtering me verbally:

You used to write with so much passion about your work. And all I read lately is: 'look, I made another 50 campaigns' and 'look at me I'm going to New York'. You have changed, but not in a positive way.

This one works double. It could not only convince a lot of readers, but it will also set me to think. Because this would actually be a reader of my weblog who knows all about me. And if he says something, maybe a lot of other people think I've become arrogant as well. I would have questioned myself and the way I'm writing. Which is a blow right between the eyes with much more impact than when somebody says I'm ugly.

Anyway, I know that I never hestitate to scream it out loud when I think I did something good. Call it arrogance if you want. I call it self-esteem. In my opinion modesty is the first sign that somebody is arrogant. For example, people who say: "yeah I have success, but success is only relative" most of the time say that to draw extra attention to what they've achieved. If you do things that you're proud of, show it to the world! Don't let yourself hold back by a couple of jealous people who think you've become arrogant. Even worse than people who are arrogant are people who want to destroy other people's self esteem out of frustration or to feel better themselves. As for Mr. or Mrs. Anonymous: if you don't like my blog, maybe you should stop reading it. And next time put your full name under the comments, it forces you to think about what you're writing.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hate Mail. interesting.

Here's what i think about hate mail from one of the best books ever: Don Quixote.
“He said, Master! Master! Speed up. These dogs might bite us' ... 'Be quiet, when the dogs bark it is because we are working.”

1:55 am  

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