Having argued online for going on six years now, I’m always a little surprised by who bothers to get mad. Despite getting in a scrap or two in my time, I’m never really able to predict why some people get upset and some don’t. Today’s case in point: Deadspin’s Tom Ley, a bright guy and good writer whose jimmies I’m perpetually rustling, for reasons I can’t quite divine.

Ley is particularly odd for me because he works for such a massively popular site. Oftentimes, the people who get really mad at me are people who really want to be blogging or writing professionally and have not had success. They don’t get mad because I’m particularly important– the opposite, really. They get mad because I’ve gotten some small piece of attention despite not being particularly successful, whatever that means. What happens a lot is that people get invested in online writing, and they know that readership and attention are the currency of that realm, and so they get pissed when someone they see as undeserving gets some of either. I have occasionally gotten these anguished emails– why is so-and-so linking to you? Why are you in this conversation? And I always just say, who knows? They thought what I said was well-expressed on interesting. Other than that, it’s chance, network effects, the limited number of hours in a day. You can only really get mad about that stuff if you’re under the false impression that there’s such a thing as meritocracy of attention.

My average post gets something like 500 unique hits. On my old blog, I’d occasionally get ones that got like 10,000 over time, but those were few and far between. It just doesn’t seem worth getting animated over.

With Ley, there’s no such possible reason. I mean, Ley writes for one of the most influential and powerful blogs on the internet. I’m not trying to  shine anybody on; I’m just being honest. You could argue– I would argue– that Deadspin is the single most influential blog in the history of the form. I mean, what blog has produced more news that has had more real-world impact on its subject than Deadspin? What blog is more likely to get name-checked on some cable drama? ESPN tries to actively ignore Deadspin, but they have no choice but to reference the blog constantly. That’s about as much success as you get, online. There are literally thousands and thousands of people who would love Ley’s job.

Meanwhile, I’m a guy with the same free WordPress theme as everybody else. It’s just a little odd. I’m just some dude, man, I’m eminently ignorable.

I guess it just goes to show that people really do care about how all this online stuff. I often will get into arguments with people online who will, as their frustration mounts, recall some fight that I was in years ago. “Yeah well, remember when so-and-so really handed you your ass!” The particular fight and particular opponent changes, depending on circumstance, but the basic tactic is the same. Now I will fully cop to having lost a lot of fights online. But I am surprised that people imagine I’m still tore up about arguments that happened years ago with literal strangers. It’s almost charming, that people would think words have that kind of effect. If I still carried around the emotional baggage from all the fights people expect me to, I wouldn’t have the energy to exist.

It’s a weird world out here. I’m just trying to navigate it.