For those who aren’t familiar, Get Off My Internets is a blog and forum that lampoons popular ladyblogs—fashion and “lifestyle” blogs especially. (I don’t mean ladyblogs like Jezebel or The Hairpin, but mostly personal blogs.) GOMI users are often decried as vitriolic bullies, a complaint that is not entirely wrong but also not entirely correct. Commenters can be mean, but often they have a point, like “shilling for every random company makes you look cheap and tasteless”.
High-profile bloggers with “snark threads” on GOMI should pay attention to what their detractors say, especially since GOMI commenters are avid readers of the blogs they enjoy trashing. Some bloggers recognize that GOMI runs the gamut: Mike Gilger of The Fresh Exchange wrote, “I expected to be upset and angered, but instead, by the time I got to the bottom of the forum, I was feeling inspired. It inspired me to start being more open about work, rather than […] vague about the actual struggles we reference. I want to find a more balanced way to show the beauty and the grit.”
GOMI creator and moderator Alice Wright told The Daily Dot that the forum’s enthusiasts are “people who work really hard and read blogs for entertainment. They get […] annoyed when bloggers post about their hard, busy days of going to aerobics class, eating a bowl of oatmeal, and taking a picture of it. And if readers want to offer any critique at all, bloggers don’t want to hear it.” Much of the anger on the forum is a reaction to clumsy monetization attempts that don’t respect readers’ intelligence.
If you would like to obsessively read more about GOMI, which is what I do whenever I discover something that interests me, I suggest 1) checking out the site itself, and 2) reading “Inside the Internet’s Craziest Destination for Blogger Hate” by Chavie Lieber. Then, yanno, do some Google work. Whatever. I’m not your mom.
So ANYWAY, when you set up your GOMI profile you can link to your personal blog or any other website that you want to promote. If you have the time and inclination to add more ~social media~ to your life, it’s a good idea.
Of course, be aware that using GOMI in a spammy way will not work. That is a terrible strategy. Don’t try to play SEO games or who-knows-what may have occurred to you. On the other hand, frequenting GOMI in a way that contributes to the community is fantastic PR for your blog. You are given an opportunity to demonstrate your valuable insights to people who are dedicated blog-readers. People who are critical thinkers (mostly). Pretty much the optimal audience, right?
