the delete and block button

on social media boundaries and denying people access

One thing I didn’t know about blogging and social media is how seen I would feel. I’m a pretty private person in general, which probably seems a little incongruous with what I share here. I share a lot, sure, but I keep enough and enough important stuff to myself that my life is still very private.

The first time I went “viral” I was not at all prepared for that many people to see me, to have an opinion on my art, my work, my life. I went from about 2,000 followers and a small community online to several million people seeing my work and it felt terrible.

Since then, I’ve taken a lot more time and effort to examine my relationship with social media and avoid putting myself in positions where I can be effected by what people might say about me.

The first and easiest step was separating myself from my online persona— the Maddy you see online is not a real person, it’s a collection of words and images that culminate into an idea of a person, but my “content” isn’t me the person. Critiques of the content are not critiques of the self. (I talk about this entire concept in are influencers people? the answer may surprise you.)

It’s a lot easier for people’s cruel comments or false assumptions to roll off you when you fully recognize that your social media is a performance and not your whole self.

social media’s latest fun project is people yelling at me for using the word “Midwest” to describe Midwestern States. Video here.

Another rule I have for myself— I don’t engage in any arguments on social media, especially arguments I care about. You simply cannot have meaningful conversations on apps designed to profit off your anger or frustration.

And that is really, really hard sometimes.

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of comments and DMs asking for (demanding) locations for places I’ve shot my photos. Listen, I fully believe in sharing outdoor hikes and locations, but I don’t necessarily think TikTok comments are a good place to do it, nor do I believe it’s a photographers job to provide location information.

I have so many detailed trail guides readily available on my website that share pretty much every location I’ve ever photographed, for free, with lots of detailed information on how to visit in a way that is both safe for you and for the environment. They are not hard to find— why should I have to do the additional work of replying to hundreds of individual comments answering “what trail is this”?

So I made a video about it on TikTok, which I should not have done.

TikTok, if you aren’t aware, is designed to melt your brain out your ears. In my little video, I replied to a comment that said “drop the locations”, with a quick, 30 second blurb that essentially said I don’t usually because a) I think social media is a bad place to try and make detailed trail guides and b) I have already made tons of detailed, free trail guides which are super easy to access. you can find all of them linked here!

Another sentiment I’m really tired of? “Don’t share your art because people will move to the midwest and it will be overrun”. It hinges precariously on the idea that some people are more deserving of outdoor access than others.

Mistake. I was called a pretentious gatekeeper and passive aggressive immediately. It was passive aggressive— demanding people answer your questions and calling them names when they don’t is likely to strike a nerve at some point. I was annoyed.

I answered the comments for a few minutes, but what is the point in trying to explain your point to people who are willfully misinterpreting you?

Social media is supposed to be fun— if it’s making you feel bad just put the phone down. It doesn’t matter that much.

In the past, I’ve thought blocking people who disagree with you and deleting things that people are disagreeing with was sort of cowardly. Watching comments roll in from the two to three people who I had really bothered, I couldn’t help but think of how stupid the whole thing was.

I had made a video that they (all two of them) had decided to take offense in, probably because they’d already decided they didn’t like me (or rather, Maddy the persona, they don’t know me). There is nothing that I could say that would make them hear what I meant not what they were choosing to hear, and all that was happening is I was feeling frustrated and attacked, and they were feeling frustrated and angry as well.

It felt like the app was winning, people were feeling real negative emotions in the real world over something as arbitrary as whether or not I, as a photographer and trail guide writer, am a pretentious gatekeeper for sharing trail guides on the internet but not in a TikTok comment.

I blocked the two women, and deleted the video. Maybe they aren’t bad people, but I don’t really care. We are not entitled to access to people on the internet, be it writers we read, influencers, photographers, content creators.

I deleted the video not because I don’t stand by what I said, but because it just doesn’t matter. People will keep demanding my time, whether it’s asking me to plan a vacation for them and getting annoyed when I send them a blog post link not a personalized guide, or calling me names for not listing to them personally the exact details of the photos I’ve taken.

For the two people I had who didn’t like what I’d said, there were more that did and agreed with me or at least understood me. Still, when it comes down to it, needlessly controversial content is not worth my time, and it honestly wasn’t worth theirs either. By deleting and blocking them, they can go back to their lives feeling like they’ve won something, and that’s three less people getting mad about something on they saw on TikTok.

A new boundary for me? I have to use TikTok for work, but I’m not replying to comments on the app with anything other than the most basic of replies.

a quick list of social media boundaries that have helped me a lot in the past few years:

• Focus on community: social media isn’t all bad, especially when you focus on cultivating a community of online friends. There are people I don’t know at all (hi, maybe you are one of them!) who I exchange messages with, enjoy their posts, and am always cheering for as a stranger. This can make social media a very positive experience and I really love seeing the lives of people I don’t know.

• If I am feeling a negative emotion from social media— anger, frustration, jealousy, self hate— I log off and don’t indulge it. I get my news from non-social media sources I trust and if something on social media is making me feel bad, I simply remove it. I do not need Instagram or any app to profit off my negative emotions.

• You don’t need a “good” reason to block someone. Teaching myself that it’s okay to deny people access to my inbox has been one of the single best ways to ensure that I am able to write on the internet without my head exploding. You actually don’t need a reason at all to decide a stranger cannot message you or see your content anymore. We do not have an inherent right to be heard by strangers, and no one can "force” me to hear them. (Did you know you can block someone through email too? It is completely possible to deny internet strangers access to you completely.)

• you cannot make everyone happy. Really, truly realizing that it would be impossible for me to share things that everyone thinks is great 100% of the time made a big difference for me in how I feel about creating photos, writing, and sharing online. Some people just aren’t going to like what you do, and that’s normal. It’s also okay to mess up. If you only share perfect writing or content, you’d never end up sharing at all.

While mostly I write here about travel and the outdoors, occasionally I write about social media culture because I feel it is incredibly important to talk about. If you enjoyed this short piece, you might like these as well: