why do you think people send anon hate?
They want to be heard, in their umbrage, but they don’t want to risk the consequences, which can range anywhere from a bombardment of angry friends & followers to doxxing & legal ramifications. On Tumblr it’s also a means of attempting to force the recipient to respond in public: partly to make it publicly known that someone disapproves strongly of thingy (that’s what we’ll call the subject of anon hate for the purposes of this response) and partly in hopes that the recipient will show their ass (because let’s face it, a lot of people make asses of themselves when responding to anon hate, whether they realise it or not).
Sometimes it’s a purely malicious attempt to throw someone off their game and upset them as much as possible. Sometimes it’s a matter of wanting to lay an unpleasant truth on someone but knowing that they’re probably either a) not going to listen and/or b) going to fly off the handle anyway.
Connected to the bit about forcing it to be public and avoiding consequences, it frees the grey from the possibility of dialogue, because at the core, sending anon hate is not “let’s talk” – it’s “listen to me.”
[rebloggable version here]