I know that I will be forever grateful to have the experience of writing on Odyssey. It’s like a pseudo-journal for me. When I started writing, I thought that turning in an article every week would be a chore. To my everlasting relief, it’s been a sheer joy writing articles and reading other creators' work.
To me, this website is more than a bunch of college kids writing articles. It’s a nonbiased platform where people can connect through sharing personal struggles on a human-to-human level. This is vastly different from mass media outlets that interact with someone on a corporation-human level. Despite the benefits, it worries me that plenty of creators constantly attempt to abuse their power.
Let me explain.
I’m sure plenty of readers have seen other Odyssey creators' posts about scandalous topics. There was a creator who wrote about why they cheated on their boyfriend and doesn’t regret it. Another creator wrote about how she willingly became the “other woman” and broke up a couple and doesn’t regret it. Another creator wrote about completely belittling her own gender, refusing to apologize for it.
I’m sure you can guess the trend of some creators' thinking. It’s one thing to have an opinion or to make a mistake. On a website filled with college students, there is bound to be a plethora of cringey moments and “oopsies.” The fact that people share their mistakes or have a bigoted opinion doesn’t bother me.
It’s the entitlement that kills me.
More often than not, when I read the “edgy” mistake articles, there isn’t a learning curve to the story. It’s not an “I cheated on my boyfriend and it’s because of x, y, and z. I admit that it wasn’t the best thing that I could have done, but I’ve learned from it because of a, b, c and d.” It's more of an “I cheated on my boyfriend. I did it and if you don’t understand, you’re stupid and ruining my own self-discovery.”
It’s becoming more and more obvious that these creators feel bad for the mistakes they made but, instead of owning up to it, they write an article to excuse their mistake and then expect people to applaud them.
And God forbid the creators don’t get the reaction that they want from their articles.
There was a time that I saw a creator argue with almost every single comment that disagreed with her article. Instead of taking it like an adult they, yet again, tried to defend themselves in all capital letters using the, “YOU ARE STUPID AND I'M ON A JOURNEY OF SELF DISCOVERY! I CAN DO WHAT I WANT!” argument again.
It was obvious that the creator was projecting her own guilt onto other people, instead of coming to terms with the fact that she isn’t proud of something that she did.
The fact of the matter is that if a creator does something horrible, they aren’t necessarily a bad person. They aren’t the worst person on Earth or even the worst person on the website. I’m not trying to shame people, as that would be counterproductive and hypocritical. I just want the creators of Odyssey to take responsibility for their actions and be able to receive criticism when doing so.
Will we see it?