Something Worth Ruining
Trolls have been furniture here for years. I’m not sure exactly when they moved in—somewhere around the point where the readership got large enough that a stranger’s bad mood had somewhere convenient to land.
They’re not unique to this corner of the internet. Fashion people deal with stalkers who curdled after being ignored. Political writers get torched by opposing factions and sometimes their own. Personal essayists hear, with mechanical regularity, that they’re boring, ugly, irrelevant. You know how it goes—you’re a loser, nobody’s listening, nobody ever will. Same script, recycled across every comment field on every platform since approximately 2004.
What separates a troll from a critic isn’t the disagreement itself. I read hostile feedback as carefully as praise—sometimes more carefully. Good criticism sharpens things. What trolls do instead is run a sustained campaign of micro-destruction, dragging every thread toward personal animosity, smothering actual dialogue before it starts. They’re not there to improve anything. They’re there to perform.
The volume tracks with scale. The bigger this place got, the more they showed up. Some I can trace to specific disappointments—a video not featured, a pitch left on read, an email that got buried for too long. The rejection curdled. Now it lives in the comment field, anonymous and patient. Others have simply bought into the received wisdom that this journal is some kind of hipster tabloid and treat every post as an open invitation to perform outrage. Some are rival bloggers who couldn’t build traction. Some are ideologues. Some are probably just having a spectacularly bad Tuesday.
Here’s what’s strange: the observations often aren’t entirely wrong—just the conclusions drawn from them. Yes, I’ve been writing less personal work lately, because I’ve been studying and genuinely don’t always know what I want to say. No, that’s not a calculated move. Yes, this site posts explicit content and treats that as unremarkable. No, that doesn’t disqualify it from covering anything serious. The contradiction is in their framing, not in the work. They use a true premise to reach a false verdict, which is a useful trick if you’re not actually interested in the truth.
I tried engaging, early on. Every hostile comment felt like an invitation to reason through things, to correct the record. I figured out quickly why "Don’t Feed The Troll" became the canonical rule of the internet. Respond once and you confirm that the approach works. Neutral readers take notes. What you’re actually building, comment by comment, is a supply chain for more of the same.
There were phases where I seriously considered shutting comments off entirely. Most people who want to react hit the share buttons anyway—they don’t leave text. But comments are still worth preserving for the people who use them properly. And routing everything through Facebook login would just mean handing the mess to a platform I trust even less to handle it reasonably. Plus, economically, every comment counts toward ad revenue—which isn’t a reason to keep toxic ones, but it’s a reason to keep the field open.
The honest admission is that the troll impulse isn’t quarantined in other, worse people. I’ve been at a computer with a bad day behind me, landed on someone’s blog, and felt the urge to say something I had no business saying. I’ve let it pass. That’s the whole difference—just the decision to let it pass. Whatever’s underneath it is not so foreign.
Blocking the worst ones remains the right call. There’s a specific, quiet pleasure in knowing they often can’t tell—the comment appears posted from their end, and they go on feeling effective. Something funny about that particular form of non-engagement.
To anyone else running something online and absorbing this kind of weather: trolls are a side effect of having built something large enough to irritate people who haven’t. Delete comments freely—it’s your space, not a public forum with constitutional obligations. Engage only where it’s worth it. And the next time the volume spikes, take a second to notice what that actually means. Someone considered you worth the effort to damage. That’s not nothing.