Why the I Love Charts post is the most beautiful thing I’ve read today
There’s so much to like in this post. It starts with nuanced exploration of feminism, terminology, and privilege, but ends as a reflection of the difficulties of staying a good person on the internet, especially when you run a site.
Dealing with trolling makes you hard and reactive. Even non-trolls delight in deliberate misunderstandings. False outrage is the norm. As the level of dickishness increases on a site, everything pressures people to react senselessly, to look only for weak spots, to engage in the point-scoring that is the currency of mobs instead of the conversation that marks true communities.
And you have to do that, to some extent — to treat every interlocutor in a comment thread with equal credit is a recipe for disaster. So ultimately, the dicks on the internet pull us all down with them.
Yet even given these things, beautiful things happen on the web. This post from the “I Love Charts” guy is one of them.
Yesterday we posted a chart to which some people took offense. One person took the time to write us directly with her anger about the chart. I took exception to her tone and disagreed with her assertions and regrettably fell into one of the more simple traps of poor communication, writing a …
