I Moderated a Forum for Six Years and Half the Members Thought They Knew Me

For six years my name was attached to several thousand posts on a forum that grew to two hundred thousand members. I was not famous in any sense; I was a visible person in a medium-sized place. That was enough to produce something I had only read about, and being on the receiving end of it changed how I think about my own relationship to people I follow.

What it is like: a substantial number of people knew a great deal about me — my views, my sense of humour, how I react under pressure, several details of my life I had mentioned in passing over years — and I knew nothing about them. This is not a complaint. It is a structural fact of a one-to-many channel and it is nobody’s fault. But it produced situations I was not prepared for.

People would open a conversation in the middle. Not rudely — warmly, referencing something I had said eighteen months earlier that I did not remember, in a tone appropriate to a continuing friendship. My honest reaction was usually a moment of panic while I tried to work out whether I was supposed to know them, followed by a slightly stilted response that I am sure read as coldness. I got better at it and I never got good at it.

The other thing was the correction. When I changed my mind about something, or was in a bad mood, or made an ordinary mistake, a certain number of people experienced it as a betrayal of a person they had constructed. The intensity of that was genuinely surprising and, once or twice, frightening. What I understood eventually is that they were not reacting to me; they were reacting to the loss of a stable object they had built out of six years of my posts, and the fact that the object was made of real material I had produced makes it more confusing rather than less.

What it taught me about myself is the useful part. I follow perhaps ten people whose work I have read for years, and I had a comfortable sense that I was above the parasocial thing because I was aware of it. I am not. When one of them wrote something I disagreed with last year, my first feeling was a small sense of having been let down, which is an absurd thing to feel about a stranger’s opinion and which arrived before any reasoning did.

So my position now is that awareness does not dissolve it, and the useful move is behavioural rather than attitudinal. I do not open conversations in the middle. When I contact someone whose work I follow, I write as though to a stranger, because I am one. And I try to hold the fact that everything I know about them arrived through a channel they control, which makes it accurate and radically incomplete.

The last thing, for anyone who is themselves visible in a small place: the warmth is real and worth accepting gracefully, and it is not owed a reciprocal relationship. It took me about three years to stop feeling guilty about that, and the guilt was making me worse at the job than the honest asymmetry ever did.