Simple Answer

I’d never heard of GOMI before .

Welcome to GOMI, short for Get Off My Internets, a website devoted to chronicling the chronicles of the internet famous. Stylistically, it borrows Gawker’s snark and Reddit’s threads, tackling fashion, food, lifestyle and motherhood blogs with a gimlet eye. If lifestyle blogs are a picnic of optimistic, well-styled, sarcasm-free conversations about kids and mason jar crafts, GOMI is the crowd in the corner predicting the hostess’s imminent divorce.

So, basically, a bunch of arseholes who cannot create anything of value themselves, so trash those who do. So, nothing new here, then. Thing is…

Although GOMI has been around for almost a decade, for the women targeted on the site, there’s still little they can do when it goes too far.

Ignoring it?

For Jenna Andersen, the low was getting an email from a stranger who said they’d reported her to Child Protective Services for letting her baby sleep in the bathroom because it was quiet.

“They were pursuing efforts to have our children taken away because they had read about us on GOMI, and that was enough evidence to prove we shouldn’t be able to have our kids any more,” she says.

Okay, that’s crossing a line and time to go to the police. But otherwise, ignore it?

Natalie Holbrook, 33, who writes the blog Hey Natalie Jean, started her blog as letters to her mom. Her output is also up for a “Biggest WTF” award. She says the harassment she experienced through GOMI sent her to therapy.

“It legitimately put me on antidepressants,” says Holbrook. “You try to stay away from it, because the minute you read it, it’s in your brain forever – my flat forehead, my ugly nose, or that my husband hates me. I thought once if I said, ‘You’re really hurting me,’ it would stop, but it just got worse.”

So, again, ignore it. If you have the relevant details of the  people running the site or trolling you, ban and delete. I use Cloudflare to keep nasties away from the site entirely.

In some respects, I find it difficult to empathise with either protagonist in this dispute. I’m no great lover of the mommy blog and I equally dislike the kind of catty behaviour we see from the GOMIs. I’ve seen first-hand stalking behaviour and trolling. I dealt with it. I am still dealing with it. Mostly, it is delete and ban as appropriate. Otherwise, it is to ignore them when they pop up elsewhere.

I then get on with life.