The Digital Wasteland

Why are some readers so hostile?

Walter Rhein
4 min readOct 28, 2020

Photo by sebastiaan stam on Unsplash

Sometimes the internet makes you shake your head and wonder. What drives all the misplaced hostility? What compels people to write aggressive and embarrassing comments that a two-second Google search could disprove?

Is everyone on the internet going through a bitter divorce? Have they all just lost their jobs? Why is everyone so angry?

Yesterday I had not one but two mini battles of the sort that I thought I’d escaped forever when I gave up Facebook. Yet, here those people are again, crawling out of the woodwork to provoke and run, content that they have left the world just a little bit worse off than it was before they acted.

Articles about making money writing

I am the first to admit that there are too many articles about how much money you can make writing online. I also confess that I’ve contributed my share of these articles. My only justification is that I feel my articles are grounded in reality.

I’ve worked as a writer for 20 years, and I’ve figured out a variety of ways to make money at it. However, I’m the first to admit that oftentimes, you can’t do better than a slave wage working as a writer. The baseline I like to use to judge whether a pursuit is worth it or not, is whether or not I can make a thousand dollars in a month.

A thousand dollars isn’t enough to live on, but it’s a start. I wrote an article detailing 5 ways that I’ve made a thousand dollars in a month while writing. The article was accepted by The Writing Cooperative, which is one of the larger publications on Medium. You can read it here and judge its quality for yourself:

The comment

Today I received a notification of a new comment on that article. Here it is:

Walter Rhein

I have 10+ years experience as a certified English and Physics teacher. 20+ years of experience as an editor, journalist, blogger and novelist.