From snark to dark: how harassment took over the internet

For years, snark has been the internet’s lingua franca. It is the default tone of a million tweets, Reddit posts, comment sections and online blogs — the arch, mocking chatter of life online. But if the line between snark and cruelty was always blurry, it is now starting to feel nonexistent.

Go back a decade to when author Jude Ellison S Doyle described snark as a “goofy internet neologism”. It was mean humour, Doyle wrote. “Snark is the kids at the back of the class, heckling the substitute teacher; it’s the voice of people who feel stifled, talked down to, or left out.”

The description is impeccable, but it comes from a time when writing things online seemed a relatively harmless activity. Ten years on, that looks like wishful thinking.

At what point does snark become harassment? Look at Get Off My Internets, aka Gomi, one of the biggest and meanest so-called “snark sites” around. Created in 2008 by US blogger Alice Wright, Gomi documented the people that Wright called “internet celebrities” — mostly bloggers.

“An internet celebrity is somebody that’s known to people who spend a lot of time on the internet and read a lot of blogs,” she once told The Awl (another site popular in the 2010s). “But if you went up to Joe, your accountant, he wouldn’t know who they were.”

Internet celebrities still exist, of course, even if personal blogs are on the wane. Gomi still exists too, though it now looks like a time capsule. The aesthetic — an unadorned message board full of anonymous posts from people with a weakness for acronyms — is decidedly retro. Like #FollowFriday and the urge to upload dozens of Facebook photos after a night out, snarky online forums are a relic of the 2010s internet that now looks wildly old-fashioned.

At the height of the lifestyle blog era, sites such as Gomi were a place for tens of thousands of readers to blow off steam. They were the backlash to earnest posts selling a saccharine vision of unattainable perfection. I liked reading the wisecracks even when I didn’t read the blogs in question.

When the artifice was revealed — seemingly happy couples announcing a divorce, for example — readers felt betrayed. Snark sites saw themselves as a valuable corrective

The threads felt like a collective and evolving discussion on what was and was not acceptable about putting life online for public consumption. Shilling dodgy diet plans — not OK. Doing deals with big brands — OK, as long as they seem “authentic”. Posting pictures of children and writing intimately about their problems — definitely not OK.

The obsessive level of knowledge on display was always weird. If you hate a blog so much, then why not just stop reading it? But forums such as Gomi could also act as an early reaction to the symbiotic relationship between online influencers and their audience. The cosy tone that bloggers used made readers feel as if they were friends, just as social media stars do today.

But bloggers show only what they want to show. When the surface cracked and the artifice was revealed — seemingly happy couples announcing a divorce, for example — readers felt betrayed. Snark sites saw themselves as a valuable corrective to this.

The problem is that many of the comments posted were not thoughtful examinations of the interactions between influencers and fans but straight-up insults. In a recent thread about an innocuous post by fashion and parenting blogger Sassy Red Lipstick, one Gomi user wrote: “No one is jealous of what they have . . . They hate the way they act and go about their lives. They need to realise they truly have little friends and have lost friends for a reason.” The vitriol is unpleasant and unwarranted. It is also mild by the standard of some attacks.

The line between snark and cruelty may simply depend on who dishes it out and who is on the receiving end. Few people admit to bullying but four in 10 Americans say they have experienced online harassment, according to the Pew Research Center. Politics, gender and race are cited as the main targets for harassment. Tech companies set rules on misconduct but online harm remains a constant battle.

The heyday of snark sites dates back to when the online world felt far removed from the real one. But life online does not exist in a vacuum. Commenters may feel as if they are simply shouting from the back of the bus. For the people they target, however, this is harassment.

Elaine Moore is the FT’s deputy Lex editor

Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first.