Part of the scenery, unfortunately. Delete is your friend - there's nothing heroic about keeping all the bullshit commentary. It's like a dog turd on your lawn - would you leave it there?
Didn't I say that at over a fifth of Americans are estimated to have a mental disorder? I'm just guessing that it's higher than most other countries (this is not a mellow place to live). That's purely speculative, of course. In any case, before social media (of which Lit is a part), such people had fewer options to express their feelings. Nowadays, it just takes a few moments at the keyboard to spew anything you wish.
Agreed 100 with the caveat to not internalize much of anything commented here.
Here's a thing. I've gotten used to the throwaway hate. I actually read the 'constructive' hate. One person correctly (and rather hatefully) pointed out that my characters tend to repeat dialogue within a story too much. He (probably he) was correct and I repeat less now. I'm not cured of repeating, but I do it less.
What do you mean, "that has not been resolved?"
I've not haven't too many problems here, but some other people (like the OP) have. Sometimes critical feedback can be useful, although it may sting initially to read it. The last time I wrote anything for publication was over forty-five years ago for a college newspaper. Every issue might get one or two letters mailed in, so there wasn't a lot of feedback. Of course, the other people on the staff had some say about what went in, but generally they were pretty open to whatever was available.
There were a couple of threads about it a while back - I've lost track of the time. The way I remember it, the ability to turn off comments and votes clinched it. I always leave them on, and I usually don't remove any comments that are lucid. Sometimes they are useful.
It takes someone knowledgeable to sift a living wage's worth of gold from muddy streams. Certainly more than the average submitter looking to find gold in dem thar hills.
I probably overstated the mental disorders aspect. I guess somewhere I picked up the idea that "human nature" is basically good and respectful, and anything that isn't is by definition a symptom of something wrong. Maybe that's what my parents, teachers, the church, the media, and everyone else taught us sixty years ago. I was skeptical even as a kid because there was plenty of evidence that it wasn't true. Yet I wanted to believe it anyway because otherwise the world seemed too unpredictable and even dangerous.
Public comments on SOL are still a relatively new thing, and the author has to jump through hoops to even make them available. No comments is the default, and the submission wizard skips over the comment setting in the standard progression. You have to actively go back and change that setting to allow public comments. It's frankly a pain in the ass if you want to allow commenting, and most readers still aren't conditioned to even think about it.
