Conversations With People Who Hate Me: What it's like confronting your online trolls for content

Dylan Marron is the podcast host who turns negative comments online into content 
Dylan Marron, digital creator and host of the podcast, Conversations With People Who Hate Me
Luke Fontana
Amelia Heathman12 March 2019

Who hasn’t posted a sarcastic message about someone else on the internet? Whether it’s a particular outfit someone is wearing or maybe an ironic quip during Question Time, social media would be nothing without these various jibes.

Yet, we can sometimes forget there is someone at the end of that quip, who may read it afterwards. According to a study by Amnesty International and Element AI last year, women are abused on Twitter every 30 seconds.

We know it happens but we don’t always know how to deal with these messages and the impact they can have.

Digital creator Dylan Marron decided to take the negative comments he was receiving online and turn them into a podcast. Named Conversations With People Who Hate Me (Conversations), the show recently reached its 30th episode, so we caught up with Marron to talk social media, podcasting and what to do when facing abuse online.

How Conversations With People Who Hate Me started

As a digital creator, Marron has conducted a very public presence on the internet for a while, though it was the YouTube series ‘Every Single Word’ which chronicled every word spoken by people of colour in various different films, such as Moonrise Kingdom or Wedding Crashers, when he started to see the negative comments rack up.

“I developed this weird coping mechanism where I would click on the profile picture of the person sending the negativity and learn about them because humanising them somehow made me feel better,” Marron tells the Standard.

He says he can’t fully diagnose why this helps, but it somehow made the messages “seem less scary”.

This eventually moved to engaging with the commenters – he started messaging them to ask if they would like to talk on the phone, which is how the podcast came to be born. The show is produced by Night Vale Presents, the people behind the hit fiction podcast Welcome to Night Vale.

The first episode was nerve-wracking. “We really are terrified of things we don’t know,” says Marron. “And social media as it exists today doesn’t really encourage us to get to know the human we’re interacting with so the fear is natural – the fear of who they are, the fear of what they might say.”

Engaging with the internet IRL

Since that first episode, Conversations has turned into a hit show that everyone must listen to, winning a Webby award in 2018 and being listed as one of Apple Podcast’s best shows in 2018.

The subsequence seasons still see Marron engage with his detractors, but also moderate conversations between other people and their online trolls, such as singer Amanda Palmer. He says he was hesitant at first to work with celebrities.

“They need to be willing to be vulnerable and introspective and all of those things – and Amanda was absolutely perfect at it.

“It’s more like, 'what can these conversations open up, how can we learn from them?'”

It’s key for Marron that he isn’t looking for apologies during Conversations. A lot of the time he does hear, ‘Oh I had no idea you would see this, I was just sending this out into the world,’ and he wants to ensure that it isn’t a debate show but simply a chat between two people.

“I don’t want to make this divide of us versus them – “us” in terms of the people who read these comments and “them” being the people who write them. I’m not this internet saint who uses the internet perfectly – I too have shouted into the void.”

Marron also doesn’t call for the end of social media, though he says he would like to sit down with the creators of these apps, like Jack Dorsey at Twitter, to discuss the problems of the medium at large. “I’d be fascinated to see what they think of it. I’m thinking about it on a micro scale – connecting an individual person to me, but I don’t operate on a macro scale. I don’t operate with over a billion users, that’s a different thing.”

How to be a person on the internet … or not

If you’ve ever received mean or negative comments on the internet, then you might be taking notes from Marron’s stance. But, he is keen to stress that this isn’t always the right method. “I personally get a lot out of it, but I would never say: ‘Pick up the phone and call your detractors.’”

He goes through a certain level of steps at first, from simply direct messaging someone to chatting to them on the phone off the record, before getting to the recording stage.

“I’m a queer brown person and there are a lot of softly spoken brown queer men like who are also like, ‘I’m just trying to survive, I don’t want to talk to someone who called me a faggot online.’ And we get that,” he says.

Marron with the Webby award he won for the podcast
James Hartley

Instead, Marron’s advice, if you are facing an onslaught of negativity, is to take a break from the internet. “Talk to someone about it in a non-digital way. Engage with your detractors only as much as you feel comfortable and safe to do so. I’ve had really great things doing it, but that’s not true for everyone,” he adds.

Companies are trying to change the landscape too. Twitter recently introduce new reporting tools, to make it easier to highlight personal data misuse on the platform. Instagram lets you block specific words or phrases in comments and messages.

Yet until something structurally changes within social media, there is going to be negative comments and abuse online. “The very structure of a comments section is still to make it so you’re jockeying for up-posts,” explains Marron. “The snarkiest thing wins, so that’s what people will say and a lot of the time, it’s that the meanest thing wins.”

That being said, he doesn’t think he will be leaving social media anytime soon.

“I still love the internet and love how connected you can be to people through the internet. I see this podcast as a form of connection through the internet where I record the phone calls and they go into a podcast – a medium that didn’t exist not that long ago.

“I love the internet – I encourage us all to find creative and ethical waves to keep using it well.”

You can listen to Conversations With People Who Hate Me on Apple Podcasts, Podbean or your favourite podcast app.

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