I Won't Beef You Into Virality

The trend of hit pieces on big writers to instigate Viral Feuds

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

I feel very fortunate to have found success on Substack after a decade-plus history of repeatedly getting fired from tech jobs and wondering if the only thing I was good at was making my Sims cheat on each other with bisexual spellcasters. Partially thanks to very frequent publishing, a genuine love of writing and masterpieces like The Great Coochie Wars of Reddit, I have ascended to the #1 spot on the humor bestseller chart (for now, anyway.) I publish often, so if you’re in my niche, you see my stuff a lot, perhaps even if you don’t want to. I’m everywhere. I’m so Julia.

But when you’re everywhere, something happens. People who aren’t in your target audience get kinda sick of seeing you. No matter how successful you are, there will be people who don’t like your work (usually because you don’t write about stuff they like) and therefore believe that you don’t deserve your success, because if they don’t like something, nobody should. Pick any big Substack player, and there are a million people asking why they’re so successful when they only write about (topics I don’t like.) Many such cases.

But another thing happens when you get big on here. Instead of trying to network with you or build rapport for the sake of promoting their own work (and if someone quotes/links me in a positive way, I usually restack them!) certain people attempt to trigger you (or your friends/allies) into responding to their slimy little hit pieces about you as a way of going viral. Matt Yglesias knows this all too well after Nathan J. Robinson posted a long hit piece about him on Current Affairs last week. I’m not going to link to it for obvious reasons, but

Jeff Maurer

wrote a much better summary and rebuttal here. But this is (probably) exactly what Robinson wanted. Matt Yglesias is more famous and more successful than he is. By writing a long screed about Yglesias, he got loads of attention because he was able to bear-poke his way into virality. Even if Yglesias didn’t spend much time on it, people who like him did.

Anyway, it’s started happening to me over the past couple months. I won’t be linking to any examples for the exact reason I just outlined, but basically, I can’t open Substack without seeing at least one weekly attempt at a “Machine Gun Kelly feuding with Eminem” style diss track about me, except in the form of something much geekier, lower-T and pseudo-intellectual. I actually had this post written several weeks ago and it was in drafts, so this isn’t a direct rebuttal to yesterday’s hit piece (yes, there was another one yesterday which was more “negging” than personally offensive) but rather an acknowledgment of what happens to me fairly often. In fact, when I first wrote this, it was triggered by another diatribe about me and I was like, “I better put this in drafts for a while so that person doesn’t think it’s all about them” and now it literally isn’t because lots of people are doing it.

My critics, whether in the form of a note or a post, usually start by acknowledging that I’m not actually a bad writer or that they’ve seen a few things from me that weren’t terrible, but ultimately complaining that I’m either saying things that are too obvious, am not funny, talk too much about stuff “nobody” cares about (ie: stuff they don’t care about) or that I hate men. At this point, either the author, his commenters or both will start spiraling into a weird psychosexual thing where they nitpick my body, my marriage, what they imagine my sex life is like, or other things that really give big stiff-sweatpants energy. It’s rare to see content like this that doesn’t repeatedly remind everyone I’m a “white millennial woman” in her thirties and make what they believe to be clever comparisons between me and literally any annoying or untalented white woman my age. It’s the aggrieved male writer version of how everyone in 2003 thought it was really edgy and funny to say they hated the word “moist.”

I don’t think I’m getting these attacks because I’m soooooo successful. I’m really not that successful, at least if you compare me to people like Noah Smith, Nate Silver or the aforementioned Matt Yglesias. I’ve considered that it’s because I’m a woman, which isn’t the full story. I’ve gotten random hate from plenty of women who are more feminist or left-leaning than I am (usually calling me a pick-me or incel sympathizer) although the lengthy Substack screeds that invariably get into an imagined assessment of my attractiveness, marriage and sex life are from men. But no, I don’t think it’s about either of those things. This happens to me often because I have unintentionally made myself known as an easy target for petty feuds.

I’ve been “CHH” on the Internet for a while now, so I’m used to all sorts of weird comments. Most of the time, I manage to ignore them, but the one type of comment I struggle to ignore is someone who’s insulting me in a way that just feels really ripe for a funny response. If someone dangles an insult in my lap that I know is a layup for a joke, especially if they don’t seem particularly unstable or vulnerable, I cannot resist.

This was dumb of me. I mean, I guess I didn’t lose anything in the short term (people thought my joke was funny) but I just gave people a heads up that if they say something rude about me, they can expect to get attention and exposure for being CHH’s Clown of the Day. The person who called me a “grifter” above wound up getting a lot of attention because I stupidly thought it was le epic troll to respond to her. In fact, it feels like that particular piece was the impetus for other people to try their hand at provoking me because I made it clear I was up for it.

I know all of this is kind of giving “don’t put it in the papers that I’m mad,” so let me address that point. First of all, I shouldn’t have to deny being mad. It’s perfectly reasonable to be angry or hurt when people insult you. For some reason, we’ve twisted ourselves into this contest of “who can care less,” essentially doing mental BDSM to each other and seeing who can get the hardest spanking without whimpering. Except, unlike BDSM, we haven’t given consent, so it’s like if you’re walking into a Trader Joe’s, some guy randomly paddles you on the ass while giving you a shit-eating trollface grin, and you have to pretend it’s fine or else he wins.

He doesn’t seem too bothered, but if Matt Yglesias turned out to be annoyed, angry or hurt by the Nathan J Robinson piece, it wouldn’t make Robinson more correct. It wouldn’t make Yglesias owned. Upsetting someone doesn’t make you correct; it makes you an asshole. As for whether I’m upset or not, it really depends on the critique. Some of them haven’t bothered me at all, and some have. I just take issue with the idea that in order to play this sick and demented game, I have to pretend I’m never mad. What if I’m mad sometimes? What then? What are you going to do, get mad about it?

I will concede that you have to accept a certain amount of criticism when you develop a big audience, and I’m not expecting that nobody will ever say anything negative about me. It’s just that you can tell when the critique is in the “negative review” category, versus the “attempting a viral beef” category. The latter is where I take issue, because it’s obnoxious.

Either way, I’m just not responding to it, linking to it, or engaging with it, not because I don’t care (the fact that I wrote this whole post indicates I do care, at least a little) but because it’s exactly what they want. Maybe some of these people are doing it purely for the love of the game—they’re writing about how much I suck because they truly feel passionate about how terrible my work is. (I would argue if writing about things “nobody cares about” is such a problem, writing about someone who writes about stuff nobody cares about is even less interesting.) But usually, these people are doing this in direct restacks to me, tagging me, linking to me, and doing this in an effect to get me to respond because I’ve shown before that I’m willing to do it. They don’t even care if my response makes them look stupid, because they know it will be blasted to 33,000 people. Negative attention, as any preschooler will tell you, is better than no attention at all, and if you want to get big on Substack you need to get attention. You can get that attention by writing things people enjoy, but if you fail at that, you can also just poke and prod some bigger writer into getting mad at you. I’m not going to be that person anymore.

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