In this line of work, having a troll is the opposite of having a fan. It’s someone out there—across the astral span of the internet—who has decided to keep tabs on what you publish with the singular intent of mocking everything you write. Since I never had one, I wondered if people like this had gone extinct alongside the rest of the web I used to know. After all, digital media, and its trademark pugnacious tone, is basically defunct. The linear rapport necessary for a blogger to become someone’s nemesis simply no longer applies; the written word is on life support. At least, that’s what I thought—until I discovered the Slate comments section. At last, I had finally found my haters.
Comments sections are, by nature, snarky. The format was devised to be a digital version of the newspaper’s good old-fashioned Letters to the Editor page—itself a receptacle for readers to loudly hector the opinion columnists they found annoying. Once considered default features, many of those sections disappeared as digital media matured, mostly because editors determined them to be hotbeds of inanity and harassment. (Recently they’ve made something of a comeback—earlier this year, the Atlantic reintroduced a comments board after abolishing it in 2018.) But Slate’s comments section has survived, and it has retained its characteristically adversarial register to this day. The threads bloom with treatise-length complaints, exasperating grammatical pedantry, and the usual flame-war material. Anyone who has ever written professionally has contended with some version of this, but what surprised me about Slate’s community was just how closely read the taunts in the comments section tended to be—particularly when they were channeled in my direction. Sure, I’ve been hit with plenty of run-of-the-mill drive-bys—“I really hope my Slate Plus dollars aren’t paying this guy,” reads one comment to my 2024 story about men wearing chains—but other insults reveal a profound metatextual fluency in my entire oeuvre. It’s as if the commenters are reading my work voraciously with the specific intention of obliterating me.
In the autumn of 2023, as part of Slate’s long-running Human Guinea Pig column, I was tasked with donning a Mario costume and busking for change in Manhattan. I think the story turned out pretty well, but the incident has been cited, derisively, in the comments section of dozens of articles I’ve written since. “You’ve never forgiven him for putting on that Super Mario costume in Times Square,” read one, left by user Muffin the Mule, about a story published almost three years after the Mario adventure. When I checked the comments on a story I wrote in the spring about Tucker Carlson’s gonzo ballcaps, one read, “Do you think Winkie wears the hat with his gold chain?” In another, about plastic surgery, I wrote that I left the house dressed in a chambray shirt and salmon shorts. This fairly normal outfit offended one user so much that he has made sardonic references to it on multiple occasions in the comment box.
You get the idea. It is not just that I get roasted relentlessly—it is that the roasts are meticulously tailored, leading one to believe that making fun of Slate writers is, for the commenters, among the prime incentives for visiting the website. And I am far from the only person here to get that treatment. Slate contributors far and wide have endured their own bespoke wisecracks, and that has nurtured a, let’s say, complicated relationship with the magazine’s comment box among the staff. One colleague told me that her mother has occasionally taken up in the comments herself, slinging zingers back at the trolls on behalf of her daughter. (My mom has done this too—I imagine it’s among the main reasons she pays for a Slate Plus subscription.) Another co-worker told me that she ventures into the comments on extremely rare occasions, often as a self-loathing exercise. (“The last time I checked on them was two years ago when I wrote a piece I was convinced was terrible,” she said. “I knew someone in there would agree.”) But the person on staff who possesses, by far, the most comments-related trauma is Slate Jurisprudence editor Jeremy Stahl. In his early days at the magazine, Stahl was made a community moderator of the Fray—the venerated message board that Slate operated in the 2000s. Even in those days, Stahl remembers, the tenor of the comments was largely the same as it is now.
“It was, for a while, a very hostile, troll-y commenting community,” Stahl said. “They said some of the meanest things anyone has ever said to me. It was a bummer.”
This all brings me back to my personal troll. Unlike some of my fellow Slatesters, I’ve never felt especially victimized by the comments section. I have thick skin, and I’ll happily admit that I have a perverse fondness for the backlash that results from an incendiary blog. (I’m also white and male, which excludes me from some of the gnarlier flavors of trolldom.) But if I’m being honest, there is one user who has a unique talent for vexing me. He posts under the username Flexo, and he is the person who has picked on me the most during my time at the magazine. I’ve gotten to know his rancorous countenance well over the months and years, as my byline has become flush with essays. In fact, when I take my ambling scrolls into the comments section, my eyes instinctively seek out his name. I think I’m morbidly curious to see if I’ve finally won Flexo over. The answer—eternally—is no.
“This guy is far and away the worst writer I’ve ever read. I feel like I need to have a lime bath to disinfect myself after using the word ‘writer,’ ” wrote Flexo beneath the aforementioned Tucker Carlson piece.
“Don’t post here, it only encourages him,” he commented on a story I wrote about a viral dieting trend. “Winkie is a blight on what still passes for journalism,” he added.
“Never heard of him. Winkie is the worst.” This is Flexo one more time, offering his assessment on a profile I wrote about the right-wing comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. Someone responded to him saying that I “like the obscure” in my writing subjects and enjoy “being on the edge of a movement.” To which Flexo countered: “A bowel movement?”
It goes without saying that Flexo and I have not met, nor have we ever spoken to each other. This is how it always is between a writer and their commenters, and as such, I’ve never been quite sure how to interpret the flavor of his smarm. Is my dear Flexo just an ordinary jerk? Is he trying to offer me some tough love? Did one thing gradually transform into the other? Really, all of those questions led me to another question: How much does Flexo hate me, really? The only thing I knew for sure is that, for better or worse, the people at the bottom of my articles—the ones responsible for the thousands of comments tapering off into an infinite scroll—are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the most dedicated readers I’ve ever had, in a moment in media history when “having readers” is harder than ever. Despite all the negativity, a clear kinship exists between us. With Slate’s 30th anniversary around the corner, I wanted to get a better sense of their relationship with me—and the magazine as a whole.
That meant I needed to give Flexo a call.
*****
In order for this project to work, I needed to create a dossier of my biggest haters. Evan Urquhart, Slate’s veteran community manager, agreed to help. I gave him 30 usernames to help me track down. Urquhart seemed to do this out of love for the community he has helped steward for more than a decade. He struck a considerably different tone than Stahl did. I think he knew what I was up to.“Our commenters are really funny, and really smart. Some of the meanness is more like their love language,” he told me. “Our community is made up of lovable, crotchety grumps. God bless them.”
And so, armed with my dossier, I fanned out dozens of emails to the denizens of the Slate comments section. This presented another challenge: Was I crossing some sacred line? Especially when the commenters in question have said so many nasty things about your work? I worried that seeing my name pop up in the commenters’ inboxes might come off a little intrusive, or perhaps even narclike—a fracturing of a trust. And seriously, I wasn’t here to settle scores. Instead, I told these commenters that I was working on a story about Slate’s longevity, and that I wanted to know what has kept them around the magazine across so many different eras. That was basically true, as far as I was concerned.
Flexo replied in less than 15 minutes.
“You sometimes drive me crazy, but I do love our community, and none of it would be possible without the writers,” wrote Flexo, striking a much more conciliatory tone than I had grown accustomed to. “We have a great community and it’s nice you recognize that. This was a very nice email to send.”
One week later, I jumped on the phone with him. After years orbiting around the exterior of the comment box—peering inside with macabre curiosity to witness the ways I’ve annoyed the regulars most recently—it felt a bit like making first contact.
Flexo, as it turns out, is a 62-year-old guy named Ron who lives in the Pacific Northwest. I learned that he holds a degree in physics from the University of Oregon, and that he worked as a professional musician for decades. He told me that he loves jazz, and onetime Slate staff writer Jamelle Bouie, and that he hated my longform feature about the Creed cruise. (It wasn’t about the writing, Flexo told me. He just can’t stand the band’s music.) Most importantly, I learned that he isn’t active on any forms of social media. Facebook bores him, and he doesn’t have accounts on Twitter or Bluesky. No, the only place that Flexo posts is the Slate comments, which he visits almost every day.
There is a long history of people, adrift in the frigid expanses of cyberspace, finding close fellowship in unexpected places—be it a niche subreddit, or a lonely Discord outpost, or the stately vestibules of World of Warcraft. The saga of Flexo, and the underbelly of Slate as a whole, is proof that the same dynamic can be replicated in a venue that exists primarily for readers to gripe about Dear Prudence letters. That makes it a testament to the tenacity of digital communion. For instance: Flexo has an Instagram account, but it is set to private, and he follows only 13 people—all of whom are fellow Slate commenters. They hang out sometimes, offline. (“I’m friends with several regulars,” he said.) Together, they work around the limited social features of our commenting interface—no direct messaging—by ferreting over burner emails to each other. (“It’s like a Slate-only email address,” Flexo said.) Failing that, Flexo is happy to treat Slate the same way you or I might treat Nextdoor. A few months ago, Flexo offered up a characteristically off-topic comment on a random Slate story complaining that one of his amps was on the fritz. Another user, who lived in Flexo’s area and had some mechanical know-how, replied, right there in the comments, offering his help.
“He wrote, ‘Swing the amp by my house, I can fix it,’ ” Flexo said. “I’m like, ‘Are you serious?’ ” He was, and he took care of it.
All of this is to say that Flexo is not some nihilistic troll. His participation in Slate’s discourse isn’t driven by the arbitrary destructiveness of, say, the average Twitter shitposter. Flexo has an investment in Slate, mostly because without Slate, its comments section would cease to exist. This is the symbiosis that defines the community, and it’s also why former Slate staff writer Dan Kois always thought that the comments section might as well exist in a “different universe” from Slate proper. I get what he means: While the community relies on Slate’s infrastructure and is fluent in the magazine’s tone, the section also possesses its own hermetic culture—one replete with idiosyncratic norms and insulated memes, like a Petri dish embedded in the HTML of one of the few publications to survive the wipeout of digital media. As for why these folks have stuck around despite their occasionally acrimonious attitude toward Slate itself, Kois just thinks that’s an immutable reality of the internet. If you build it—if you provide a blinking text box and the chance to pester an author—they will come.
“It’s like that scene in Jurassic Park with Jeff Goldblum,” Kois said. “Life finds a way. Wherever there’s a little crack, they will flourish.”
by Luke Winkie, Slate | Read more:
Image: Mark Alan Stamaty
[ed. I've often wondered about Comment Section personalities. What do they hope to accomplish? Maybe in this case just the name Winkie sets them off.]
[ed. I've often wondered about Comment Section personalities. What do they hope to accomplish? Maybe in this case just the name Winkie sets them off.]
