Don’t Read the Comments: A Guest Post by Leigh Stein

A Gothic mystery for the social media age, this satirical novel follows a recently dumped Dayna, who gets swept up in a viral campaign after a well-known astrology influencer goes missing from a hype house that has more secrets than subscribers. Read on for an exclusive essay from Leigh Stein on writing If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You.

A decade ago, when I was in my girlboss era, organizing bicoastal conferences for women writers, I had a Post-it note on my laptop that said DON’T READ THE COMMENTS. If you were a woman writing on the internet in the 2010s, those four words were the equivalent of a protective spell. You wrote about the worst thing that had ever happened to you for xoJane or Salon or Jezebel or Vox and then you summoned all your willpower to avoid finding out whether total strangers found you to be a sympathetic narrator of your own experience.

When I started using TikTok in my late thirties, I carried this mantra with me. I didn’t read any of the comments on the videos that my twenty-something assistant Callie sent me—I’d hired her to help me learn the platform, as I wrote a contemporary gothic novel set in a hype house. We had long Google docs of research on different niches: couples accounts (where a boyfriend and girlfriend, or a husband and wife, or two wives, share an account and create content together), tarot card reader accounts, rabbit owner accounts, and maximalist fashion accounts. She was also collecting videos for me of women crying on camera.

Callie told me I had to start reading the comments.

When I did, I learned that the comment section on a viral video is like a huge playground. There’s a participatory element to TikTok content that’s more like Reddit than Instagram. Fans go to war in the comments (e.g., Hailey v. Selena). Brands play along in character. If a video is confusing or obscure (this can be a tactic to drive engagement), users share clues. The funniest comment can get tens of thousands of likes.

Britney Spears once said, “There’s only two types of people in the world: the ones that entertain, and the ones that observe,” but on the internet there’s a third type: the participant. The participant might be valiantly defending their favorite creator from attack or solving a mystery unfolding in real time.

In my novel, an aging millennial gets hired to make a D-list hype house a success. One of the content creators, a tarot card reader, has disappeared from the house, and the millennial figures out how to use the participatory nature of TikTok to turn the search for the missing influencer into a series of sponsored content.

By far the most fun I had writing this novel was parodying the comments, with all the spelling mistakes (your beautiful) and the idiomatic expressions of the niche subcultures on the platform (I claim with light and gratitude). If I could have written the entire novel as one massive comments section, I would have.

The stereotype of a TikTok user is a zombified glassy-eyed scroller—what Britney calls the observer—but read the comments and you’ll find them teeming with life.