A comparison was recently brought to my attention with Helel’s page compilation of angry messages and mine by a few intuitive users on Discord which made me get all reflective. Side note: This is going to be slightly personal so take this with a grain of salt (Oh God, the puns!) and feel free to read the title and skip to the last paragraph for the point.
The two people had their concerns about why it was alright for me to have this rage page, and why Milan is getting derision by some for his. They mentioned that they thought it was unprofessional of me and could result in users being mocked for things they said/did and hesitant to contact an admin with a question for fear of being put on a target for ridicule. Here’s my response:
If we’re being honest, there are a lot of reasons why I made the salt mines in the first place. The first being a place to compile comments that I felt needed to be kept for the sake of context/for future reference (i.e. the one user who doxed me, the others who threatened me (whether serious or not as this is the internet) so they can be easily accessed instead of wading through 35+ pages of comments with about 75-100 comments on them should the need arise, and for easy access if a familiar face so I can remember what their grievance was and how I responded (for example, with Rocketcombo, I gave feedback while also cataloguing the names of their multitude of socks that were about as numerous as Nommeh) and how I should respond. Also, there were users who commented that they enjoyed scrolling through my talk pages to read hate messages left for me. While not instrumental in my decision, it did draw my attention to the fact that there are people other than me and the person messaging me that are watching.
More than that though:
I saw my salt mines as a way to keep users aware of their actions. This isn’t something that gets forgotten about each time I archive my page. Being honest with you all, that shit can get under your skin. I had users attacking photos of me, sharing hate on DeviantArt, making youtube videos, and criticizing my life choices (my education, my romantic life, my social life, my time in the Peace Corps particularly, with anyone who read my anthology about my years spent there, they know it’s a bag of snakes that I both love and hate at times due to my experiences there and what is happening to them now.) While I can dismiss a lot of the salt, it does build up and I figured this was the best way to remind people of the permanence of what they say. It doesn’t get erased each new page and forgotten. There’s a person on the other side of that keyboard. If you say something mean-spirited to someone, it sticks around so I made a place to remind people to weigh their words like I do whenever I message them.
I wrote on the opening link: “Here to leave a hateful message??? Why not check out the Salt Mines to see how ineffective Internet rage is against me before wasting both our time.” and that isn’t true. It was more to act as a deterrent, a bit of bravado. (“Don’t bother taking time to come up with the perfect insult as it’s not going to get under my skin.” Sometimes it did. Not always, but sometimes. I can admit to that now. You can’t necessarily field 100+ angry messages without some of it breaking skin.) No one is immune to every insult.
I spent a lot of time on this site writing feedback, about 30 minutes to an hour each time it was requested and to spend that time trying to give them feedback and point out issues, only to get that in response, well, it can be disheartening. Some of you know that the first story I wrote as a kid was an abomination (100+ page wall of text that was like “My Immortal” bred with huffing paint thinner while watching Resident Evil and Dragon Ball Z.). Few know that my next five stories were all that long and had a lot of those errors. I sometimes wonder how much better an author I could have been if I didn’t spend elementary school to high school writing at an elementary grade school level and convincing myself that it was good and didn’t need to be subject to criticism or break from tropes/cliches. I guess that’s what drove me to give all that feedback and spend hundreds of hours pointing out the issues present that they need to address in order to fix. I honestly want users to learn and become better writers, and I want to improve the overall quality of stories on this site as it was this site that convinced me to take up writing again and get better while I was in the Peace Corps. The Salt Mines was just a way of shaking off hate and quarantining it to a specific place (“Those guys are salty, but there are other users who want a review on this site and want to become better writers.”)
I thought I needed it. I don’t.
I need to let go of that place and realize what I was doing. Just like those users who wrote those things to me likely forgot about them shortly after, I did too once I found myself no longer needing to be an admin who’s subject to scrutiny and I’m sorry for that. To make a terrible example, you don’t live in close proximity to a sewage plant (the Salt Mines) and not get fumes off of it. I compiled them to use as some sort of shoddy shield against internet hate. I forgot about the effect they may have on people around me on the site (people who looked up to me, and people who will hopefully be better than me).
The final paragraph (i.e. the one you read to save yourself ten minutes and still get the gist.): I would like an admin to delete the Salt Mines. I saved it to my comp on the off chance that I actually need to reference it I find myself being threatened again. Leaving it up sets the wrong example. Like in Paid for in Blood, that mine needs to be dynamited and shut off from the world. Cancerous hate grows there. I should know, I cultivated it. I nurtured it. I hid in it when I should have realized that I didn’t need it to do what I wanted to do (help authors improve). I’m sorry. I hope to be better.