People move from small towns to places like Seattle and revel in the semi-anonymous nature of their new found "personalities". They come to the city not to find themselves but to loss themselves in whatever little hipster posse they latch onto.

They live sad little lives. I wouldn’t pay them too much attention. They act that way because they were either given too much or too little attention growing up. What they really need is to move to a real city and let it swallow them up and spit them out like every other person who thought more of themselves than was good for them.

evan handed over the moderator key to me one time; that only lasted for a horrible twelve hours.

Before I moved here, I had been a participant in the LJ community for my hometown, never thinking twice before posting questions about the Farmer’s Market, impressions of the town, or pretty much anything else. It would occasionally bring me a mean comment or two, but very rarely.

My first post to the Seattle LJ, when we were thinking about moving was admittedly a Googleable question- but I’d never been made to feel so stupid in my online life, honestly. I can play along now nicely in the community, having figured out the tone of things, but it really made me actually reconsider *moving* to Seattle because of how mean everyone was in that post. Maybe I’m overly sensitive or heaven forbid, not a local Seattleite… but whatever. That really negatively affected my view of the city for a few days until I met some nice Seattle journalers who were happy to answer my question (in my own journal, of course).

I was hoping that if I learned to let things slide that I would do better in that community, and I have, to an extent. But last summer, after we moved, I posted another question to the community- this one on a fairly sensitive topic that wasn’t Googleable (adoption laws in Washington for those living in one-bedroom apartments). That one garned such negative feedback that I just stopped looking at the responses after a while…

More recently, I posted another question asking about infertility specialists… and after about four snarky comments about how I probably shouldn’t be having children anyway because I was just such a terrible human being… I deleted the post, and am now extremely wary of posting anything at all there.

Chelsea must be pretty courageous to write for Slog- I’ve seen the commenters there, and … it can’t be good for anyone’s emotional health to be subject to that kind of comment. I hope she finds a good place where she can get more constructive feedback. And I’m glad, too, Wesa, that you’re trying to make Seattle’s Internet a slightly nicer place to be.