Haters

A reflective essay about fame and obsession turned into a mini comment-section cage match, with readers zeroing in less on the theory and more on who gets to call someone a “hater” in the first place. The article’s core claim is juicy and simple: extreme fans and extreme haters are basically the same kind of person, just with the emotional sign flipped. Both are obsessive, both make someone else part of their identity, and both loudly perform that devotion or disgust in public. In other words: the stan and the anti-stan may be secret twins.

But the crowd was not ready to nod politely and move on. One camp loved the psychology of it, with one commenter dropping a Lil Wayne line — “jealousy is love and hate at the same time” — to argue that haters are often people who resent someone else’s success because they wish they had it. Another camp immediately pushed back, saying that calling critics “haters” is just a handy way to wave away real complaints. That tension got extra spicy when someone pointed to old criticism around Lambda School and basically suggested that sometimes the so-called haters were just… early warning signs.

And then, because the internet cannot resist being the internet, the comedy brigade arrived. “Dear diary……” mocked the essay’s confessional tone, while a deadpan “(2020)” landed like a tiny meme grenade, hinting that the whole discussion felt painfully on-brand for our era of endless online feuds. So yes, the article was about haters — but the comments instantly became a live demo of the exact drama it was describing.