When It All Goes Kablooey

Websplosions happen. I don’t claim to understand it, but no matter how close the community, how tightly bound the members, I think I can confidently say that sooner or later, websplosions happen.

I’m a member of a community that I truly thought had a lot of trust and caring invested. At the moment I’m a pariah. From the way people are reacting, I really was inflammatory, hostile, and condescending.

The problem is, no matter how often I look at the conversation, I don’t see that.

Whatever. I’ll figure it out. Or I won’t. I was just thinking it might be nice to toss out some tips for dealing with the inevitable, that maybe, if I’m lucky, won’t leave me sitting alone on my damned island with the smoke of burned bridges all around me.

Rein in the nasty words.

One way the internet differs from the real world is that it’s pretty easy to distance yourself from the issue. You can just…step away. Get up from your computer and go take a walk. People you care about going apeshit all over your ass and you don’t get why? Walk away. Check your (RL) mail. Don’t respond yet. Whatever is going on, it will be easier to deal with if the phrase “sideways molester of under-aged fence-posts” hasn’t been tossed around.

Try to keep talking in one place.

So maybe after your walk, you’re a bit calmer but still not ready to just let it all slide by, let it go the Ephemeral Way of the Internets. You come back and people are flipping out on the forums, your IM is going mad, and Twitter is all a-flutter. You decide you can’t just ignore–you have to engage.

So do it. But maybe (and for the record, I blew this one big-time) you can keep your own input all in one place so people can see where you are coming from and maybe have a chance of understanding why you said what you did.

This is incredibly hard if people are flipping out at you in private. Try “I’m hearing that…” and vague it up so you’re not reporting a private conversation? I don’t even know. I’ll tell you what–you tell me how the hell to handle this one. But I’ll tell you how not to.

Don’t take your bitching to Twitter.

Odds are kind of good that your friends are following you over there, or at least can find it. Don’t go over there and start whining that your friends are all idiots and also you question their relationships with fence-posts. There’s also the fact that you probably have more followers than just the asploding community on Twitter–so complaining there is widening the conflict. The more people involved, the worse it’s gonna get.

Yeah, Twitter asks “what’s happening?” That doesn’t mean you have to tell.

Keep lines of communication open.

Ignore them for a bit if you must, but don’t close them down. Stay off Twitter, don’t open the emails until you can see straight, fine. But don’t block/ignore/quit things. Not yet. It’s always a route you can go later if you feel the need.

Remember the internet is both transient and permanent.

Even if you delete it fast because you came to your senses, you can pretty much bet somebody got a screenshot. If anything, the stuff you delete will probably be remembered far longer than the stuff you left in place (dependent on a lot of things, of course, but I’m betting on Murphy in this one.) So write it if you must. Save it if you like. But for the love of God and little green fishies, don’t post it until you’re sure. And then wait another day.

Also, never, ever delete something with comments. Just…don’t. The internet really doesn’t like that.

Will it work?

Hell, man…I don’t know. Can’t hurt, right?