I once made a comment on Facebook that triggered a gang attack. Within hours, hundreds of people I’d never interacted with were piling on. They screenshotted the thread and shared it think before you post. The comments were vicious. Nobody was disagreeing or criticizing anything; it was pure hostility from strangers who wanted to destroy someone they’d never met. I deleted the thread after about a hundred comments. It didn’t matter. The damage was already done, and the screenshots were already circulating.
That wasn’t my only experience. I posted a YouTube video that got downvoted into oblivion and flooded with hostile comments. I turned off comments entirely. On LinkedIn, I’ve received attacks that had nothing to do with the content and everything to do with someone wanting to start a fight. I block immediately now. No engagement, no response, no second chances.
For years, belly dancer friends who knew my photography work came to me for advice when they got attacked online. Dozens of them, dealing with everything from cruel comments about their appearance to coordinated harassment campaigns. The pattern was always the same: someone posts something, a mob forms, the mob overwhelms the target, and the platform does nothing useful.
That last part is indefensible. The platforms built the machinery that makes a pile-on possible, and they profit from every minute of attention it pulls in. When the person on the receiving end asks for help, they get next to nothing back.
I don’t expect a company to police every comment. I do expect it to stop acting as if the problem belongs to the person being attacked.
Online hostility isn’t new. It’s been part of internet culture since Usenet in the 1990s, when the practice was called “flaming.” What’s changed is the scale. A flame war on a Usenet newsgroup in 1997 involved maybe twenty people. A Facebook pile-on in 2025 can involve hundreds or thousands, and the screenshots ensure it follows you after you delete it.
What is the difference between online criticism and harassment?
Criticism says “this argument doesn’t hold up because of X.” An attack says “you’re garbage and everything you produce is garbage.” Criticism engages with the work. An attack targets the person. The distinction matters because writers need criticism to improve and need to recognize attacks for what they are: someone else’s problem projected onto your screen.
The hardest part is that attacks sometimes arrive disguised as criticism. Someone starts with a legitimate-sounding objection and then escalates into personal insults, or they use a reasonable tone to say something designed to undermine your confidence instead of improve your work. Learning to distinguish between the two takes experience, and the learning process is unpleasant.
Why do people attack others online?
To feel powerful, to belong to the mob, or to punish somebody who broke the group’s rules. Most of them would never say any of it to your face.
From the podcast
Lucas Bonder researches consciousness and traces the separation back to something learned, not given, on Leaders and Their Stories:
When you’re growing up you start developing the ego, and so you start separating from everything, and then you exist.An online pile-on runs on that separation at scale. The person on the other end is an abstraction, and that’s the only way the cruelty works.
Online anonymity removes consequences. In person, saying something vicious to a stranger gets you a confrontation, a reputation, or worse.
Online, it gets you likes from other people who enjoy watching someone get torn apart. The feedback loop rewards cruelty. The more vicious the comment, the more attention it gets, and every platform runs on attention.
Mob behavior makes the problem worse. Once a pile-on starts, people join in because attacking someone who’s already being attacked is socially safe within that group. They don’t care about the original content.
It costs nothing and wins approval from the mob. To them the target is an opportunity to perform outrage for an audience, and the human being on the other end never enters into it. I find that uglier than any of the insults.
Writers are especially vulnerable because the work is personal.
A plumber who gets a bad review can shrug it off as a business matter. A writer who gets attacked feels it in their identity because writing comes from who you are, not just what you do. Attackers know this instinctively, so they go for the person instead of the work.
How do you deal with being attacked online?
Block immediately. Don’t read the comment twice. Don’t craft a response. Don’t try to reason with someone who came to fight. Block and move on. Every second you spend reading hostile comments is a second the attacker wins. I block anyone who crosses the line, first offense, no warnings. The block button is the single most useful tool on every platform.
Don’t engage. Engagement is what attackers want. Any response at all gives them material for the next round. Even a calm, reasonable reply gets screenshotted, stripped of context, and used to escalate. Silence is the only response that costs them something, because it denies them the reaction they came for.
Delete when necessary. I deleted that Facebook thread and I’d do it again. Some people will tell you that deleting shows weakness. Those people haven’t been on the receiving end of a coordinated pile-on. Deleting a thread that’s become a magnet for hostility means refusing to host abuse, and I don’t care who calls that weakness.
Turn off comments when necessary. My YouTube video comments are off. The video is still up. The content still reaches people. The comments section was contributing nothing except a venue for anonymous hostility. Removing it was the right call.
Keep records. Screenshot the worst of it before you delete or block. If the harassment escalates to threats or crosses legal lines, you’ll want documentation. You probably won’t need it. But if you do, you’ll be glad you have it.
Talk to people who’ve been through it. When my belly dancer friends came to me after getting attacked, the most useful thing I could do was tell them they weren’t alone and not crazy for being upset. Online attacks are designed to make you feel isolated. Talking to someone who understands breaks that isolation.
If you’re a writer, the worst thing a mob can take from you is the next piece of work. They’ll move on to another target soon enough, and none of them will think about you again. Letting a crowd of strangers who never read your work decide whether you keep publishing hands them a win they didn’t earn, and I won’t give them that.
The Ultimate Flame: An Internet Artifact
Before social media turned online hostility into a mass participation sport, the art of the internet flame was almost a literary form. The most famous example is “The Ultimate Flame” by Guy Macon, posted to a Usenet newsgroup on October 20, 1997. It’s been copied, shared, and adapted across the internet for nearly thirty years.
Nobody should treat it as a model for behavior.
It’s worth reading for what it captures, a moment in internet history when hostility was performative and almost comedic, before it became the coordinated weapon it is today. A flame back then was one person showing off for a newsgroup. A pile-on now is hundreds of people trying to wreck a stranger’s reputation or livelihood, and I’d take the old flame wars over that any day. Here’s the full text.
You swine. You vulgar little maggot. Don’t you know that you’re pathetic? You worthless bag of filth.
As we say in Texas, I’ll bet you couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You’re a canker. A sore that won’t go away. I’d rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you.
You’re a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You’re degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you. You’re a bloody nardless newbie twit protohominid chromosomally aberrant caricature of a coprophagic cloacal parasitic pond scum and I wish you’d go away.
You’re a putrescence mass, a walking vomit. You’re a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You’re a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You’re a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.
You’re a bleating fool, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they’d done.
I’ll never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you.
You’re a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You’re vile, worthless, less than nothing. You’re a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?
If you aren’t an idiot, you made a world-class effort at simulating one. Try to edit your writing of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you’re a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they’ll be able to access it more rapidly.
You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs.
You’re weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You’re grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You’re foul and disgusting. You’re a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won’t have sex with you. You’re unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot.
And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you’d believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake?
You’re a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You’re ridiculous and obnoxious. You’re the moral equivalent of a leech. You’re a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You’re sour and senile. You’re a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper.
On a good day you’re a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You’re deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You’re dank and filthy. You’re asinine and benighted. You’re the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.
I can’t believe how stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You’re trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year.
Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid.
Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I’m sorry. I can’t go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don’t have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half-baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh.
The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. I’ve snipped away most of what you wrote, because, well… it didn’t really say anything. Your attempt at constructing a creative flame was pitiful. I mean, really, stringing together a bunch of insults among a load of babbling was hardly effective… Maybe later in life, after you’ve learned to read, write, spell, and count, you’ll have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us “normal” people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering.
But we sometimes forget that there are “challenged” persons in this world who find these things more difficult.
If I’d known that this was your case, then I would have never read your post. It just wouldn’t have been “right”. Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you.
P.S.: You’re hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful, cowardly, deadly, mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable, belligerent, opportunistic, barratrous, contemptible, criminal, fascistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, avaricious, tasteless, idiotic, brain-damaged, imbecilic, insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented, lame, self-righteous, Byzantine, conspiratorial, satanic, fraudulent, libelous, bilious, splenetic, spastic, ignorant, clueless, illegitimate, harmful, destructive, dumb, evasive, double-talking, devious, revisionist, narrow, manipulative, paternalistic, fundamentalist, dogmatic, idolatrous, unethical, cultic, diseased, suppressive, controlling, restrictive, malignant, deceptive, dim, crazy, weird, dystopic, stifling, uncaring, plantigrade, grim, unsympathetic, jargon-spouting, censorious, secretive, aggressive, mind-numbing, abrasive, poisonous, flagrant, self-destructive, abusive, socially-retarded, puerile, clueless, and generally Not Good.
I Hope This Helps…
[The first known post was by Guy Macon, 10/20/97]
