Carly Riordan knows that thousands of people hate her, because they've been getting together to talk sh*t about her on forums for more than a decade.
Riordan has published her lifestyle blog continuously since 2008. Back then, she was a Georgetown undergraduate overachiever who shared her preppy OOTDs (outfits of the day) and study tips. The blog, initially called "The College Prepster," evolved with her as she graduated college, moved to New York City, and worked at a startup. After a few years, she went full-time with the blog and has been doing that ever since. She moved to New Jersey, got married, and now has two children. In 2021, she published Business Minded: A Guide to Setting Your Mind, Body, and Business Up for Success. Her life is completely different from what it was 16 years ago, but the blog remains. So do the haters.
"I used to check my Google Analytics regularly to track where traffic was coming from," Riordan says. "One day, I saw a website name I had never heard of directing traffic to my website and I clicked into the link. Someone had posted a link to my website in a comment talking about another blogger at the time and I was kind of horrified."
The link had led her to what's known as a snark forum, where readers gather anonymously to make fun of bloggers and influencers. Communities like Lipstick Alley and Get Off My Internets were early influencer snark forums, but a lot of the snark has moved onto Reddit now. There are subreddits dedicated to specific influencers, but also larger communities based on geography or niche. This is where snarkers keep tabs on influencers and debate the finer points of their insufferable behavior and unrelatability.
In one sense, snark culture is a symptom of people being online way too much: It's a toxic response to the toxic 21st-century phenomenon that is the influencer. The old internet adage "don’t read the comments" is urgently applicable here. I've seen posts nitpicking the way influencers' bodies look, the way they decorate their homes, and even sharing links to the apartment buildings where they live. It's a lot, and it's often ugly.
But influencers are just a newer iteration of celebrity, and likewise these snark communities are a newer expression of a basic fan impulse, the desire to critique and be heard by celebrities. This is less a quirk of latter-day celebrity culture than a phenomenon as old as celebrity itself, adapting to a new format.
In her book The Drama of Celebrity, Sharon Marcus argues that three entities—the public, media producers, and stars themselves—work simultaneously to create and perpetuate celebrity in our culture. These three entities compete with each other for dominance, but also sustain each other in Marcus’s ecosystem of celebrity.
As long as there have been celebrities, there have been fans who build identities off of their proximity to those celebrities. The acts of collection, critique, and remediation are core to the performance of fandom. Marcus analyzes scrapbooks and diaries compiled by fans of actors in the 1860s, and finds that "not only did theatergoers have a range of opinions about how actors should move, speak, and wear their hair, they were willing to go to a great deal of trouble to express them."
Marcus notes that when technology made it possible for theaters to be kept dark with a spotlight on the stage, spectators assumed more of a critical posture than before, when they might have spent the show chatting with each other over the performance. "Far from being passive and acquiescent, audience members ... saw theatergoing as an occasion to exercise their acumen and did not hesitate to advise a celebrated young actor on how to improve his performances," she wrote.
Marcus cites a collection of fan letters found in actor Edwin Booth’s home: "Some correspondents positioned themselves as experts who could teach Booth a thing or two about acting. One advised Booth how to read lines from Hamlet; another noted that the actor's guise as an aged Richelieu might appear more realistic if he donned 'Spectacles or what served for Spectacles in those days.'"
Ordinary folks issuing performance tips to Booth, one of the most celebrated and accomplished actors of the 19th century, anticipates strangers anonymously picking apart influencers' outfits on Reddit. That's because they derive from the same impulse: the desire to connect oneself to the projected reality of celebrity.
Envy and class resentment surely drive some of this. Influencers can make absurd amounts of money from brand deals and collaborations, and the bulk of their job revolves around monetizing and performing their own authenticity. This is a job that blends acting with marketing and editorial creation and curation, and this reality defies the stereotype of influencers as unskilled and famous-for-being-famous. Still, it's not manual labor. It's glamorous. They get free stuff from companies. They go on trips with brands. They post on Instagram as a job while their followers—whose engagement is responsible for their wealth—hate-watch their videos from comparably less dazzling jobs and lives.There's a frustration with how the market values these influencers' work—work which, by its nature, when done well doesn't look like work at all, but rather like getting getting paid extravagantly for being attractive and happy and on vacation all the time—in a society otherwise engineered to make workers feel maximally harried and aware of their fungibility at all times. But even in indignant rage, viewers can't look away.
Riordan said she doesn't read the snark anymore, but that the communities do seem louder these days, amid increased economic inequality, awareness of social issues, and post-pandemic ennui: "Honestly, I can see how sitting at home not happy with your life (whether it's relationship issues, financial issues, employment issues) and watching other people live lives you want (traveling, families, happy marriages, financial freedom) could drive you to hate them."
The other explanation for this behavior, though, might be something like genuine investment. The life of a devoted hater looks curiously like that of a fan. The snarkers convene daily, sometimes multiple times a day, to dissect and criticize every move the subject of their ire makes. They watch every Instagram story, YouTube video, and TikTok, they listen to every podcast episode, and they closely analyze the influencer's interactions with friends. They buy merch—to complain about the quality relative to its price. They go to live shows—and report back to the groups about how bad they are. With their deep knowledge of the influencers and their eagle-eyed commitment to following their content, the snarkers are often the first audience members to figure out if a breakup happened, or if someone is pregnant, or if they’ve had cosmetic procedures done. If you look like a fan, move like a fan, and talk like a fan—at what point are you actually just a fan?
A moderator of an influencer subreddit chatted with me on the condition of anonymity, sharing only that she was a woman in her early thirties living in the northeast. She said a lot of snarkers start off as genuine fans, but then something curdles their view of the influencer. "Most snarkers start snarking when something feels off or disingenuous with an influencer they follow," she wrote. "A lot of times it is criticizing the privilege of influencers, how they advertise the beauty standard to a vulnerable following, and their blatant consumerism."
Sometimes, the communities become hubs for discussing shady sponsorship deals that influencers fail to disclose clearly, or at all. More often, they're filled with screenshots of Instagram stories and lengthy discussions about how the influencers don't deserve the fame, money, or opportunities they have.
The snark communities develop rules, schedules, inside jokes, and norms. The moderators of one subreddit I followed while researching this story caught and deleted a post in which someone had identified the influencer's New York City address. The thread was filled with comments from members condemning doxing. The moderator I chatted with said she spends a couple hours a week moderating, and has become texting-friends with someone she met on the subreddit. "We know one another's identities and Reddit handles and there's a trust there," she wrote.
For a lot of influencers, having a snark community is evidence that you've made it on the internet. Riordan has found an uneasy equilibrium with her haters. "Do I wish these sites would cease to exist? Yes. Do I think it means you're doing something right as an influencer? Honestly yes," she said. "If people are interested, they're interested. Period. Even if someone is 'hate following,' they are truly some of the most engaged followers, which helps my account in the algorithm and increases my viewership, which is a metric brands use."
The snarkers, for their part, contend that their activities don't really have all that much to do with the influencers they organize themselves around. "At this point, we have a community, we have our inside jokes, and we enjoy snarking with one another," the moderator told me. "It isn't fully about them and is also about the online friendships we have made."
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