'Dab on 'em Haterz' turns surviving the internet into a game
Last month, Dab on 'em Haterz launched on Steam, an indie game that puts the player in charge of a YouTube creator who must sift through comments and presumably stay sane in the process. It's up to our hero to give negative feedback a good dabbing that banishes it from his queue and nets him some money. But it's in his head, of course. Forever scraping away at his self-confidence and belief in humanity. Yes, Dab on 'em Haterz seems a microcosm of living on the internet in 2018. As Julia Alexander of Polygon described it, the game presents players with the unenviable task of ingesting YouTube-style comments and dabbing away the endless stream of hate. You have to purge a certain amount to progress to the next level, but naturally just keeping up with the rate of bilious and often bigoted and racist words is a physical and psychological stress. People don't need a reason to hate you -- they'll find one. Per the historians of internet culture, Dab on ...