"Fuck this, I'm out of here," declares Chelsea Alvarez-Bell, blogging for Seattle's Stranger, at the end of what has obviously been a long guest-blogging stint. "I have no desire to contribute here any longer. I am taking my ball and going home. I was warned beforehand that some of the commenters on Slog could be mean. That was an understatement. The word I would use is cruel." Oh noes! The idea of mean commenters (or awe-inducing donators of labor, as a certain novelist likes to call them) taking over blogs and ruining the Internet has been quite the trend lately. Anyone got a problem with that?

It's not just her. Our very own publisher once remarked, "We were scared of the commenters for a while, yeah?"

Alvarez-Bell goes on to say:

No matter what I post here, it will be ripped to shreds, whether by the grammar police (I dare you to find me something more boring than someone correcting another person's grammar), the pearl-clutching grannies who take umbrage with my use of profanity, or those with a general distaste for what and how I write. That's not what bothers me (I just find it intensely dull). What bothers me is that I woke up these last few mornings perfectly happy... until I remembered that I had to write something for Slog and the dread set in.

Sounds like vacation-time to me! Unfortunately, full-time bloggers need a vacation at least every three months, and after being gone all of a week, you'll have missed so much CONTENT (and so many microfeuds, Choire Sicha calls them on Radar) that you may as well be dead.

Then she calls out a couple of commenters individually: "And fuck you for putting me in a position where I had to tell my mother, who was so excited that I would be doing this, that she was not, under any circumstances, to read the comments because I did not want her to know that anyone was treating daughter that way." Heh.

Their response?

Related: Should novelists respond to their critics? Harper's dissects.

However! As evidenced by last Wednesday's real-life commenter festival, blog commenters are people, too! They are, almost without fail, surprisingly sweet in person. Maybe it's because our commenters, besides being smarter than the average ones (although still disturbingly critical of other's physical appearance), live in constant fear of execution. Like in Stalin's Russia.