Toxic Trends

stormi-dawn-witch:

creature-witch:

lunaesteria:

constantly-disheveled:

I’ve noticed something lately, as I’ve been getting reacquainted with my blog and trying to re-establish myself here. 

There is this terribly toxic, and terribly abusive trend in the pagan/witchcraft community; a real “take-and-don’t-give-back” trend. 

You see blogs, even ones with thousands of followers, who daily offer original posts, helpful resources, a friendly shoulder or listening ear to the rest of the community. They often try to reach out to provide extra resources, seeking out topics of interest, needs and desires of their audience in an attempt to help educate and come together with the masses, only to be ignored completely. They seek out these followers in an attempt to give them what they want or need, and these followers, who take all this information they share and write and post, and absorb it like sponges, but cannot give any feedback-not that they cannot but that they will not give feedback.

Offer free tarot readings and you’ll have more than you can handle. Offer spell requests and you’ll get anonymous hate when you can’t fulfill all 27 of them immediately. But provide any other services, one that takes more study and research and time and depth, and suddenly those 27 people have disappeared. 

What happened to the close-knit community we had aspired to be, only a year or so ago? We talk about supporting each other, but where is the support? Where is the giving back? Blogs like mine that at one point were so focused on helping the general public shrink back away from the idea, at the risk of sounding “desperate” to be involved with the greater community on Tumblr. At the risk of receiving more anonymous hate for casting out a web and searching for anyone who may need help, advice, pointers, or a nudge in the right direction. 

I would like to see a change. Where no one is afraid to ask for the help they need, where free tarot readings or spell requests or sigil creations are not abused but actually appreciated and treated with gratitude and respect. These people provide a service to benefit you, a quick “thank you for the reading” or a “that was really helpful” makes a world of difference to those who offer these services. 

The people who tend to ask for help these days are mostly hoping someone with more experience will do the work for them, and they’re the same people who ask for 20 free readings in a day and get upset when you tell them something they may not want to hear. They’re the same people who cannot be bothered to read FAQ’s and guidelines made by certain users because they hope we will make an exception for them. They are the same people, our target audience, that we have made thousands of user friendly guides for and they still expect to be hand fed information.

We do what we can and still get stepped on and undermined.

Honestly the only thing I have ever asked for when I create content is feedback and unless I directly confront people I almost never get it. I have posts with literally thousands of notes and not a single comment on if my advice was helpful or my spell worked. It can be really disheartening and I’m not even one to constantly put out material, I can’t imagine how disappointing it must be for others who actively create a constant stream of content just to be ignored, or worse harrassed by people who feel entitled to their labor. Tbh I hardly ever offer free tarot readings anymore because of how demanding and cruel people can be.

Whenever I offer free readings I don’t really get any feedback. And now that I have more followers the best interactions I get are reblogs (which is great) but I used to get messages, and comments and asks. My stuff was also going like crazy and now I have to post my stuff to Facebook to even get something.