Harassment on my videos

[LadyScales]

I have my snakes in a rack system. But they have monitored belly heat on one section, water bowls, monitored humidity with coconut husk, and I'm hoping to upgrade my big female to a larger tub. However, any time I post about my snakes, I get a plethora of comments about how I'm abusing my snakes. I have to either monitor comments or check them as soon as they post. Is this a thing big name breeders have to deal with? How do you guys suggest I handle it? I'm trying to get my name out there to sell my babies, but comments of "SNAKE ABUSER" really don't help.

[Bogertophis]

Can I assume you're not talking about any posts on this site? Maybe you need to disable comments?

[Armiyana]

Sadly it's going to be an ongoing debate
As someone talking about the same topic on another forum said earlier the other day: "it's like religion and politics"

The important thing is to do what you can to maintain the healthiest standards you can. And from there take the needs of the individual animal into account.
I even have one girl who absolutely would injure herself or become I'll with stress if she was to be kept in an open front cage so she absolutely needs to be housed in a tub environment.

I also have a rack setup for my collection. One day I would love to put a few of my lovelies in big display tanks. But my roomies would not enjoy that. XD

What I do instead is supply fake plants for some enrichment when I can to the tubs. The babies get smaller tubs because I want them to get properly started on food and at 400g they get moved to larger tubs that have hides available for them.
Eventually, I'd love to get my larger ones moved into larger tubs (they're in CB70s) but trying to convince roomies is still tough on that too. Lol

[Caitlin]

For the sake of transparency I will say that I am absolutely anti-rack except in cases of very temporary use such as some hatchlings or for quarantine situations. However, I don't make anti-rack comments on videos as I somehow doubt that my comments are going to change anyone's mind one way or another. The same is true of others reading comments on your videos: pretty much nobody cares either way about what commenters do or don't say. People watch videos for the content, not for the comments.

I do have multiple friends who are content creators on YouTube and all I can say is that unless the comments fall under the category of being reportable because they are actual threats, you have a couple of choices: just ignore them, or turn comments off.

[Lord Sorril]

No matter what you say or do: There will always be someone to disagree with you online.

If your videos are on YouTube then you have control over the comments.
You can hover the right side of the comment and you will see three vertical dots.
Open this window and you will have the choices below:

This gives you the ability to remove any negative comments and/or block (hide) the user from your channel without having to disable all.

I use this frequently to remove bot advertisement posts.

[LadyScales]

Sorry, been busy. I have them on YouTube and TikTok. TikTok is the one that brings that the hate comments. I seem to have passed off a few people that keep commenting. I've been blocking and deleting, but I was just curious what y'all thought.

[CloudtheBoa]

Sorry, been busy. I have them on YouTube and TikTok. TikTok is the one that brings that the hate comments. I seem to have passed off a few people that keep commenting. I've been blocking and deleting, but I was just curious what y'all thought.

If on TT, it may be best to just not post your racks there. It’s really hard to control the flow of your content, the ones engaging with it are what controls it.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[nikkubus]

I wouldn't post racks on tiktok either. The average user are pretty young and easily influenced by some of the outrage videos out there who give advice against racks whilst having sick and dead snakes, keeping them in fish tanks with little places to hide, and practically no experience.

I'm with Armiayana on this one. I'd love to provide a huge enclosure for every single animal that wants it some day, but some absolutely don't want it and would get sick in a large enclosure. One of mine I can't even upgrade to a larger tub because he refuses to eat and stays in a hide the entire time no matter how long I give him to settle in or how I clutter up the tub to give him extra cover (he's also one I have to feed slightly undersize meals more often because he is even terrified of his f/t meals). I'm going to keep trying because eventually he will accept it, but for now he's in a smaller than ideal tub and it's very much his choice. I have boys half his weight in a larger one and they are fine. No two animals are the same. Most people wouldn't like being stuck in a small space, but some people are terrified of big open spaces too.

This whole issue is why I have stopped trying to help struggling snake owners on reddit. Every time I give them solid advice on how to get their brand new BP to start eating, I get downvoted and attacked by people, including mods. It really stinks, because I care about the animals and want new people to have a good experience, so I really want to help, but they aren't going to follow my advice when every other person on there insists I'm an animal abuser and no snake should ever be kept in a tub no matter the circumstances, and tells them BPs need 70-85% humidity and 95-100F hotspot.

[Snagrio]

The harsh reality is, if people want affordable snakes, rack breeding kind of has to exist. I personally don't agree with racks (though there are some nice compromises such as Snake Discovery with providing enrichment), but I don't attack people over it because that doesn't really solve anything.

It's admirable that there's a new wave of hobbyists striving to provide the very best and implement the latest techniques, but there's the unfortunate side effect of many of that crowd essentially taking it as an form of activism to portray their methods as the ONLY methods and anything else is abuse. I've come across many such people myself, indeed I've found myself swept up into it in the past and joining in. But like many things in life there's nuances, not everything about husbandry is black and white and some things work differently for different people and animals than it does for others.

[Caitlin]

I'd like to make a plea to not turn this thread into a discussion of racks. The OP asked for thoughts on how to handle comments on her social media.

Yes, I have very strong opinions along with a fair amount of research evidence related to rack keeping, but that was not the reason the OP posted. I usually check in on threads to see if there's any way I can be helpful, but I'm struggling here because I'm having to bite my virtual tongue to avoid commenting about the use of racks in general. And I just don't think that particular debate would be useful on this board or in this particular thread.

I realize some of this is my own problem and I can just ignore this thread, which is possibly the best solution.