The Barstool Haters Came Out In Full Force Yesterday

Yesterday we announced that we’ll be doing live Rundowns on Comedy Central for the Super Bowl (you may have heard) and, like clockwork, the Barstool hate crew came crawling out of their caves to publicly weep for humanity. It’s the same five or so every time and they always offer up their idea of boycott for 10 favorites then call us and our readers pieces of shit. It’s always a good time and is a flawless “brand” strategy: insult ha huge mass of people, quote tweet the 8 that reply, say “RIP my mentions” as if it’s an onslaught, rinse, repeat. It’s a recession proof strategy because we’re not going anywhere, so we’ll continue to have big announcements, and trolls aren’t going anywhere so those who hate us will always get their handful of flags to wave.

Usually on those days I stay quiet and internally stew. It’s a tactic I employ every day of my life, but particularly on those days. Nonetheless, the tweets RTd by Awful Announcing last night stuck out to me. I don’t know Dave Lozo from Adam and while I have an inkling he’s not our biggest fan, he’s not one of those people I was referring to in that last paragraph. His tweets are actually true. I get them. The fact that we’re always @’d on replies to people defending us is interesting, perhaps sometimes odd, and is an easy target to start off a sarcastic “I like how…” formula tweet.

But while those tweets we get @’d on will have me rolling my eyes sometimes, it’s one of my favorite parts of Barstool. To me it validates the culture every person in this office has worked hard to create. Not the trolls or sexists or racists that we shout down at every turn, but the family and friend feel. Stoolies see someone hating us and immediately jump to our defense and say, “Hey bud, I got your back.” Sure, sometimes it’s misguided. Sometimes it’s lame. But just the fact that Stoolies are offended that someone is talking shit about their friends and pissing on their big day is fucking awesome to me.

You’re not gonna find that anywhere else because no one gives a fuck about anywhere else. Every other site, or brand, that tries to say they’re a competitor could vanish tomorrow and no one would bat an eye, they’d find another place to give their clicks. But we’re deeply connected with all our readers and we’ve made sure of that. You want to tweet and just shoot the shit? You’ll probably get a reply. You want to bust balls in an email? You’ll get a reply. Come up in a bar and watch the game? Not one person here would do anything but grab you a stool. I don’t care if it’s one of our writers, our tech guy, our CRO, or our motherfucking CEO. Everyone here works their ass off to stay connected with our guys and make sure that no matter how big we get, we’re still attached to our people.

Yeah, sometimes a few will take it too far. I’ll be the first to admit that. But I’ve got like 10 real friends and plenty of times they’ll say nonsense that has me uncomfortably ignoring it, so if 10 of the hundreds of thousands of internet friends of Barstool are your guy at the bar that you need to say, “Dude, it’s fine. I don’t care. Don’t cause a scene,” to because they overheard someone talking about you then I’m fine with it. I’m very, very, very fine with it. I’ll go to war and die with that crew every day of the week.