Ignore, delete, try not to engage: one more perspective on dealing with web hate
“There’s this interesting culture of hate on the internet. I don’t know if it’s just that people are angry and feel a relief in releasing their anger online in the form of anonymous online “hate justice” but it’s rough on the receiving end of it. I won’t lie. People seem to think that ugly opinions are the same as constructive criticism and it’s not but there’s no arguing with them about it. They’re not looking for reasons to like you, they’re looking for more reasons to hate you.”
When is it cultural appropriation and when is it just kids playing dress-up?
Last week we ran a sponsored post for a family photographer that featured this image of two children playing dress-up, one of them in a Native American head-dress.
The photo struck several readers as objectionable. Let’s talk about why, and what it might mean.
This website can’t be everything to everyone
An odd thing has happened as the Empire has evolved: readers are REALLY invested in the websites, which is awesome. But there IS a downside…
Is the name of the Offbeat Bride Tribe “problematic and frankly racist”?
Since monthly readership of the Offbeat Empire sites is over 300,000 people, it’s to be expected that we’d receive a fair number of reader complaints. Sometimes, these complaints are truly educational (I had no idea that the Society of Professional Journalists had voted to replace the phrase “illegal immigrant” with “undocumented immigrant” until a reader emailed me about it) and other times they’re ludicrous (Offbeat Bride’s hilarious “motherfuckergate” comes to mind here). I’ve written about this before, but this last week I had a especially challenging reader complaint.