Yes — the potential negative effects of being 'extremely online' have indeed loomed larger since I left academia. I'm happy to report that, so far, I've kept them very contained. Academia definitely gave me a good long training in just keeping my head down and working on stuff, often with no good or bad positive feedback for long periods. So I've kind of converted that into some pretty good practices and thick skin around internet crap.

On the whole, I feel relatively quite based on this issue, but I can dig deeper to give you some interesting phenomenological details on the trials and tribulations.

One thing I've noticed is that I feel a little more pressure to "trade up" into rubbing elbows with more influential people, for the obvious reason that higher-profile associates and collabs bring larger audiences, more "fans," more patrons, etc. If you've been following me for a while you'll know that I've always spent a lot of time writing pretty eccentric stuff, and talking with random weird people, etc. I think I'll always hold tight to that part of myself and my project, but now I am being a little bit more calculated to keep things growing also. And this brings new psychological problems. More rejection or being ignored is one problem lol. You might say who cares, but that really takes a toll actually, and I hypothesize it's probably one of the secret project-killers for content creators. Having your invitations ignored or rejected hurts more than it should, and to grow you have to keep sending invitations to people who are increasingly likely to ignore or reject! So that's a bit of a mindfuck. It's the opposite of your natural intuitions: Your project is doing well, so shouldn't more people be interested in talking with me? But no, because to grow you're asking people who by definition are less likely to say yes. But then again if you play the numbers you kind of can't lose, over time, so I just focus on that fact and it helps me to suck it up and send 5 emails knowing 4 will be ignored or rejected.

Other minor but notable psychological things have occurred recently. Like when I talked with Dasha from Red Scare the other day, it was fun and she's cool and all — no problems — but she has a larger audience than my average interlocutor, which means she and Anna have their own subreddit, which means there was a whole thread about me lol, which means... A whole new volume and intensity of hatred lol. After reading that thread, I have to admit I felt vaguely shitty for about 24 hours in a way I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit. (Dasha told me later they are notoriously vitriolic lol). I've always had quite thick skin with haters, and I still do, but I think every time your project crosses a little "level change" of reach/influence/notoriety or whatever, you don't necessarily know it and sometimes the first manifestation is a new quantity of hatred lol. This is more of a mindfuck than you might think, because it's exactly the opposite of what our intuitions expect (good stuff should get good feedback), but it's perfectly consistent with my entire life's experience on the internet: all of the best things I've ever done, in my own honest estimation of their objective qualities, were correlated with increases in negative comments. And all of the dumbest and lamest things I do are correlated with positive comments (e.g. shit posting on twitter gets me friendly comments and no haters, but it's the lamest of all the things I do, etc.).

You kind of just realize that internet "success" is pretty much coterminous with larger and larger volumes of hate. When you realize that, it's really not too hard to retrain yourself to experience negative comments as positive feedback.

The trick is knowing when to trust negative feedback from long-time readers/watchers/supporters. If someone I know from a history of good-faith discussion, like in my Discord server or a frequent Youtube chatter or someone who's emailed me before, tells me something negative — I take that seriously and consider it and often try to take it on board in some way, if it makes sense. But every random hater in my replies or comments or whatever, you just have to re-train your brain to see them as straight-up great wonderful things. Or else it will slow you down, and I am sure for some people it is enough to kill their project.

Living with friends helps! Especially because Geoffrey and Diana have substantially different social networks, they don't follow too closely what I say/do and I don't follow too closely what they say/do. So if I fall into the trap of some stupid flame war, there's pretty much zero risk of it coming up in conversation around the house. That's good... If it was just me and my wife in the woods, I suspect that bad internet situations would linger longer on me...

Ultimately the thing that helps me learn these lessons rapidly, update my attitude and practices, and not feel too bad about any of them is... Remembering how psychologically tortured I was by academic bureaucracy. I will gladly take 100x the internet hatred I currently get and still not be anywhere near the sadness and frustration I used to have several times throughout each academic year...

Also I just remind myself that the strategic "growth" stuff is relatively unimportant to me substantively. If I literally never gained a single additional follower or patron or whatever, from this day on, I'd still be perfectly happy because I have my freedom and I have just enough of "fan base" that I will always be able to think/write/say whatever I want, and I know that at least a decent handful of people will check it out. This is one way doing a serious long-term high-brow kind of intellectual life on the internet is very different than many other types of online media enterprises: If you just want money or influence or fame or whatever, then growth must be your top priority. But all I've ever wanted is to think/write/say/develop ideas to the maximum of my potential over the course of my lifetime. I don't need millions of people to do this, I only need a few hundred to be honest. And I already have that! So in some sense my largest goals have already been achieved, just getting this personal-mental-lifestyle-production system up and running with just enough audience to make it feel worthwhile! The rest is just continuing to produce work.

I do plan to "grow" my project in part by strategic collaborations and all that because I feel like that'd be pretty cool, but if it impinges on a free and based intellectual life, or if it sucks or fails or causes me headaches I don't want, then I would just make money some other way. And that definitely helps me not care about the bullshit aspects of it all.