Criticism and Ostracism

I was telling someone who knows little of what I write online that I don't fear criticism, but I do fear being ostracized by the community.

Maybe fear is a too strong a word. Let's just say there are a few times when I've sweated mightily over something I've written, sure I'm going to piss off the wrong person.

I don't pretend to have a huge presence within the activist blogging community. It's not what my site is primarily about, but a handful of recent posts have been born out of frustration with the SJ/feminist blogosphere and who gets to have a voice in it.

Then I go and comment on the exact same sites I criticize. (Or I bury my most contentious thoughts on Tumblr -- whichever works.) Is this hypocritical?

While all this might seem unduly paranoid, I've seen it happen, and we do have the power to ruin each other's reputations. The archival nature of the internet allows everything to be cataloged and called up at a moments notice. I cringe at some of my earlier posts some of which are chockablock of problematic language. I haven't taken them down, but I conveniently pretend they don't exist. I've seen this happen too, on a BIG IMPORTANT BLOG I sometimes comment. One member pulled another's past comments to "prove" that she was a clueless, entitled twit. Those things may be true, but at what point do we get to learn from our mistakes?