copperbadge:

dorkilybeautiful
replied to your post “How do you deal with hatemail? (Especially as regards depression)”

As an aside, my experience is that when a stranger comes in hostile then suddenly shifts to apology, they’re still trying to bait you into paying attention.

Like, there are occasionally people who realize that they’ve been terrible and genuinely mean it, but the chances it’s a snare are closer to 90/10. So.

Oh, one hundred percent. And they weren’t apologizing for most of what they’d done, just the specific insult to me, and really just the term they’d used, not the actual insult. Like they still thought I was one, they just apologized for using the word. It was absolutely just a ploy to keep my attention, and that kind of desperation tells you the power of getting-attention in the modern world. 

There’s probably a thesis somewhere in here about how attention, rather than information, is the real new currency – especially given the concept of clickbait, the fact that ads are based on hits, and the overwhelming surge of voices speaking out. Not to mention fake news. 

Wow I may have stumbled on a sociological phenomenon. I wonder, someone must have written about this already…