Do STW writers get anti pricklishness training?

Been mulling this over for a while, and the Canyon Lux thread brought it home to me….

In my mind there seems to be a solid boundary between threads and articles on the site, with the former generally given kudos where deserved and the latter often picked at rather mercilessly and sharply.

Eg, on the Canyon thread, I posted an unnecessarily harsh point that they should have weighed the damn thing for the review. I felt ‘entitled’ to post that (wrongly obvs) because it was from the mag and not from a post.
Loads of other people weighed in with other points, quite a few of them quite bluntly put.
Threads very rarely get this sort of attacking response IMHO. Perhaps it’s a them and us thing. I notice this a lot on UKC where readers are much more judgemental about articles.

I wrote a long rambling thread years ago about doing the WHW with my son, by bike/canoe. There were lots of really kind and enthusiastic responses and all was well. I’m currently doing a guide to WHW for my website and was wondering whether I could convert my thread into a STW article with similar content.

But I’m slightly scared to do so as I think it will get mauled. Obviously the level of writing needs to be much higher for an article than a post, but even taking that into account I feel reluctant to put myself ( and kid) out there for a potential kicking.

@STW, when you get new writers on board, do you give them tTraining on keeping calm when people post pissy responses and not getting drawn into bickering?

As professionals, do you always count to 20 before responding, or are you all just much calmer, nicer people than me 🤔

Is this an accepted phenomenon?

Obviously the level of writing needs to be much higher for an article than a post

Are you sure about that.

Are you sure about that.

I see what you did there 😉

Threads very rarely get this sort of attacking response IMHO.

Are you sure about that

I think you’re overthinking it, you won’t get mauled.

I look forward to reading it (as long as its available to ex Premier members!) 😉

I’m not a premier member anymore (I don’t even know if I’m a mountain biker anymore), but if you put stuff out there for genpop then there are going to be some people who will have a go at you for whatever reason ranging from someone parked outside their window on the public road, to being savaged by their partner/dog/mum/Nan that morning and they’re looking to take it out somewhere.

If you get mauled, who cares. Stop reading and move on.

Knowing when to walk away is hard, and actually doing it is harder. Believe me, I know. But ultimately it only affects you if you choose to let it affect you, no-one is ringing you up to give you grief.

You’ll never please everyone…

If I wanted to try and have an article published online I’d give it a go. I think its fair to say that even the most combative members are a lot less harsh where a kids feelings are involved too.

End of the day though it’s just the net. I just walk away from a post/thread if there is a dig at a comment ive made 99% of the time. I learnt that from the Ling thread.😉 I don’t engage, try to convince or win the argument. That way leads to pointless frustration.I literally just ignore the dig as if it was never posted.

It works a treat!

Go ahead and try to get it published op, sounds interesting. Something I would read.👍

Soz, just used that WHW thing as an illustration really. My main interest was in whether people generally think they are harsher to authors than posters, and if there’s a word for it.

@stwhannah Tell me

I’d have to say members are harsher to posters as a rule.

Seen the Covid thread sometimes? Justified or not it can get pretty brutal.

The interweb is full of “opinion havers”.
They are mostly inconsequential.

But I’m slightly scared to do so as I think it will get mauled.

It’s not really being “mauled” though is it, it’s us faceless idiots, shouting at something we have a minor gripe with in the ether.

People who complain on forums (I include myself in that group) don’t really matter. It’s just throwaway text on the internet, ignore it.

Even if someone does outright call your hard work crap and unpick it point by point, just ignore them. Unless they’ve actually done the same thing but better themselves (they won’t have) what weight does their opinion really carry?

But I’m slightly scared to do so as I think it will get mauled.

I haven’t been yet, despite seemingly being able to wind some on the forum up with a 3 word question 🤷‍♂️

Well, here’s the thing: if you write something that folk read and then just nod appreciatively, you’ll have generated zero clicks. Something a bit controversial, incorrect, opinionated will get more feedback and ultimately a higher Google ranking. It depends how you judge success and your criteria might be different from your publishers.

on the Canyon thread, I posted an unnecessarily harsh point that they should have weighed the damn thing for the review. I felt ‘entitled’ to post that (wrongly obvs)

How are you not entitled to raise a question? Of course you are. Or are you simply referring to the way you went about it?

Nobody is perfect even on STW LOL.

I’m not very popular with colleagues at work currently as I have been reacting too quickly and things escalate but on here it’s much easier to stear clear of the triggers!

Years ago I wrote a couple of articles for a car owners club magazine. Well, I submitted them, which the editor then mashed together and published.

I’d written them as two very distinctly different articles, but they were mashed together and didn’t make very pretty reading. I got mauled in the letters pages. This was before the internet had really got going, so it wasn’t the instant gratification or disdain, it took a bit of effort to write a response and post it in. The editor tried to make it in to a big deal, a bit of sensationalist infighting. I just replied with a “well if you don’t like it then write something you will like”.

I’ve only just thought about it TBH, but I let it go at the time because the reactions weren’t worth worrying about. It’s like online reviews. More people will write an angry bitter review than one containing praise, so public reactions are not balanced, at least on the surface.

If you write it someone will like it and maybe be inspired by it, so it will be all worthwhile, the trolls are just that and don’t deserve the energy that’s required to respond to.

If we got such training I wouldn’t have to cry myself to sleep at night…

If you ‘never read the comments’ you’ll never improve and you’ll miss opportunities for good ideas about things people are interested in. But you do have to read them with a bit of a filter, I think. Some comments are more hurtful than others – I find differences of opinion are fine, even ‘this is boring’ or ‘I’m not interested in this’ Ok, but ‘this is badly written’ tends to smart as I’d never intend to put my name to something of low quality. Comments that show someone has a whole other belief system or political perspective are rarely hurtful either – though sometimes frustrating. One of the good things on here is that the comments are usually made after someone has actually read the article – and you lot are quick to point out when they haven’t, which seems to moderate things a little away from out and out insults. Quite often I’ll see something, leave it, and come back to it later to discover you’ve saved me the trouble of an impertinent response.

All that said, sometimes time and life means you’re forced to put out something that isn’t as perfect as you’d like and it’s inevitable that someone will always call out the imperfection just at the point when you’re feeling fragile and frayed anyway. It takes a bit of practice to take a breath and accept that you can’t do everything and do it all perfectly all the time. It’s easier done when the person complaining isn’t even paying to read it, but I don’t like to feel like I’ve let down someone who is a paying member.

YouTube comments are a whole law unto themselves. I do not enjoy doing video because of them. Having anonymous misogynist comments thrown at me is not my idea of fun.

Chipps has always said that if you write a review, you should be able to sit in a bar between someone that bought the product and someone who designed it and be comfortable with your position. I do wonder how many people would post comments quite as they do if they took the same approach. Or maybe the internet is just a bar with a lot of sawdust on the floor.

As for new writers, I do warn people of the likely reception of something if I think it has the potential to be controversial, but that’s usually a topic related thing rather than the words and sentences. It shouldn’t be shit by the time you read it because I will have finessed the words from the bones of the story, or sent it back for some rewriting.

I do often read the comments on articles on here and think ‘would they say this to the author’s face’ and in most cases the answer would be no.

Interesting replies. Many thanks all

My take as a long-time professional writer is basically that you need to develop a thick skin. You can dig into all sorts of nuanced stuff about constructive criticism and the like, but strip all that away and those are the bones of the writing for publication chicken. I’m not saying it never gets to me, but you get better at stepping back a little, learning where it’s appropriate – we all make mistakes right? – and shrugging it off when it’s not.

I think you should give it a go. On the admittedly rare occasion when someone likes something I’ve written and takes the time to say so, it gives me a nice warm fuzzy internal glow roughly equivalent to around 50 FB likes, several glasses of decent malt or an overdose of Ready Brek. Makes it all worthwhile, sort of.

As someone who writes and edits for a living, there’s no worse feeling than being picked up for a factual error in something I’ve written or edited. Any criticism in the comments is fully justified. But if it’s just a difference of opinion or a question of style then it’s water off a duck’s back.

Sadly, anyone reviewing a product needs to develop a thick skin to read the comments. Now, imagine how thick a skin the people who design, develop, build and sell those products need.

Threads very rarely get this sort of attacking response IMHO.

Not sure that’s true.

It’s simply a world of keyboard warriors out there. A few years ago I wrote several pieces for mpora.com and most of them were very tongue in cheek. However, one reader completely missed the humour. Here’s what he had to say. I’ve kept a copy because it always makes me smile that someone can get so upset about something so inconsequential.

Normally I just read over comments online and articles about mtn or road biking and keep moving but your articles stopped me in my tracks.   Some of your stuff is helpful and informative but…….. So I spent about ten minutes reading articles that have your name attached to them and all I can say is you are just one of those people that comes across as a bully/hater.  Your articles about bicycling fashion and dos and don’ts are straight out of an insecure haters manual.  Who are you to tell people how they should dress, “don’t wear Long socks”,”mtn bike shorts dos and donts, underwear under tights?   Come on you wear tighties and you shave your legs and pretend the world thinks that is manly.  You live in a glass house and have ZERO ROOM TO TALK ABOUT WHAT ANYONE SHOULD OR SHOULD NOT WEAR OR DO.  *Now I have nothing wrong with a man shaving their legs and joining the spandex brigade or wearing a “diaper” inside their underwear or wearing a dress or whatever the hell they want to do………but when they talk about what others should or shouldn’t do?   Come on!  Your a joke.  Now just bend over and take it and move on because you know it’s true!  Find new material that doesn’t make you look like a jerk.  You are very well informed and know quite a bit and people respect you but when you do this it makes you look bad dude.  I know some of these articles are old but you should never have gone there.  Once it’s online it’s permanent.

Quite a few years ago I contributed to a couple of actual paper magazines (remember them?) with reviews and feature articles and the like. On one occasion I was sent to interview someone who was well-known in his field, but almost unheard of outside it.

I did a bit of background but the interview was fairly general because that was what I’d been briefed to produce – something that was accessible for the casual reader, rather than the hardcore fan.

We did discuss some of the particular intricacies but firmly from the perspective of ‘an outsider’. Anyway, completed interview, it was published and that was the end of it. Or so I thought.

I found out a bit later (this was ‘early internet days’, mind) that there was a whole section of his fan base who went mental about the article – properly slagging me off online for what they perceived as a failure to really delve into the minutiae of this guy. Thankfully the mag didn’t publish any of the letters but the online comments were a sight to behold, and that was well before the current preponderance of social media and immediate availability.

I guess it helped to some extent knowing that these people were spotty keyboard warrior nerds who, rather than being pleased their niche interest was getting some mainstream press, attacked because it wasn’t detailed enough but I think there has to be an element of ‘**** it’ when your stuff is published, because if you took everything personally you’d never write again.

I have written a few articles for STW that were in the magazine and received nothing but praise – or at least I don’t remember any critical responses.

I think the main difference between and ‘article’ and a ‘thread posting’ is that an article is planned, prepared, reviewed and edited before sharing hopefully- even if it is just by the writer. The thread posting is just banged out after half a bottle of red wine to spout your opinion.

I think it also depends on the type of article. If it is a review then it should be technically accurate and include all of the key information with the opinions and preferences taking more of a back seat in the text. The stuff I wrote was far more of a story about experiences so far more personal and less factual in nature.

I might write another article and see if it is considered up to scratch.

I love that on stw the team themselves will sometimes chip in with their experiences and viewpoints – it definitely makes it feel more like a community rather than us/ them of the content producers and the proles who read it.

I’m intrigued by this point from stwhannah. It’s not very on-topic, but it feels from first glance that this:

Chipps has always said that if you write a review, you should be able to sit in a bar between someone that bought the product and someone who designed it and be comfortable with your position.

…can run into the modern reality of product testing/ news, where a fair chunk of the article is just the press release regurgitated. This can be because of time constraints, access challenges, or occasionally so as not to annoy the manufacturer and get on their naughty list; it’s definitely not just bikes because you can see it in car magazines, watch websites etc, but some bike magazines/ websites are definitely worse offenders than others.

So (genuinely interested) how does that work for Singletrack? Do you have to draw a line between “news” and honest reviews? Do you have to have frank conversations with manufacturers where you lay out that you won’t be pulling any punches?

This can be because of time constraints, access challenges, or occasionally so as not to annoy the manufacturer and get on their naughty list; it’s definitely not just bikes because you can see it in car magazines, watch websites etc, but some bike magazines/ websites are definitely worse offenders than others.

This annoys me when looking through different magazines to get a mixture of different reviews. I was looking for comparisons to the Aldi band saw recently and when googling reviews for band saws there were absolutely clear cut5’n’paste paragraphs identical in different reviews on different sites. Devalues the whole review if you cannot be sure if it is an actual review or a press release. My Grandma used to mockingly say “They speak very highly of it in the adverts” when talking about things where it was difficult to find independent information

…can run into the modern reality of product testing/ news, where a fair chunk of the article is just the press release regurgitated. This can be because of time constraints, access challenges, or occasionally so as not to annoy the manufacturer and get on their naughty list; it’s definitely not just bikes because you can see it in car magazines, watch websites etc, but some bike magazines/ websites are definitely worse offenders than others.

In my time I definitely had a run in with an editor or two over reviews and review scores (not bikes though) – one in particular was for a product that was touted as a revolutionary change to the existing products but was worse in every way, to the point that the changes actually made its functionality poorer than before. I gave it 1 out of 5 – but due to the fact that the manufacturer did a lot of advertising with the magazine at the time it was “suggested” I rewrite parts of the article and up the rating to 3/5. If I didn’t they’d have used the copy I wrote, suitably edited of course, in any event, and I wouldn’t get paid.

I like the fact STW are up front about their editorial guidelines – I wish more publications would do the same.

But I’m slightly scared to do so as I think it will get mauled

Chipps article in the last/last but one? edition of STW was a very insightful interview with Jamie Hibbard who wrote for MBUK in the nighties and early noughties. He (Jamie) reveals that he was in some ways hounded out of an industry he loved by both harsh written and largely unwarranted in-person critism.

Writing for living can be pretty tough

I was looking for comparisons to the Aldi band saw recently

For the love of [insert deity here] Nick, don’t buy a bandsaw. I don’t think they can reattach arms quite yet.

absolutely clear cut’n’paste

Well…

But I’m slightly scared to do so as I think it will get mauled

singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/singletrack-issue-139-discussion-thread/#post-12073377 😛

singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/singletrack-issue-139-discussion-thread/#post-12073377 😛

😮
Time to get the popcorn.

Not sure that’s going to help the OP’s chances of a) ST publishing his article, or b) people feeling they should go easy on the “feedback”

I opted not to post the link to the upsidedown bikes on the trail story I found 😲

For the love of [insert deity here] Nick, don’t buy a bandsaw. I don’t think they can reattach arms quite yet.

Just prepping the unboxing video

I opted not to post the link to the upsidedown bikes on the trail story I found 😲

I could quite easily find it, but I’ll wait til it pops up in my Facebook feed, as sure as night follows day it will.

Just prepping the unboxing video

New limbs come in boxes? Who’d a thunk it!

New limbs come in boxes? Who’d a thunk it!

I imagine “thunk!” is also the sound a recently-bandsaw’d limb makes when it hits the floor.