The Proof
You build something bigger than a hobby and they show up. Trolls. Not when it’s still just your friends and the handful of people who actually want to be there—but once you hit a certain visibility, once things start working, they arrive. They’re not here to engage. They’re here to ruin it.
They sort into types pretty quickly. The disappointed ones, usually—you rejected their work, didn’t respond to their email, made them feel small somehow. The ideological ones who decided your whole project is fundamentally wrong. The jealous ones running their own smaller versions. The ones who just need somewhere to dump their rage and found an open comment section. Sometimes there’s real substance underneath. You did move slower. You did publish something you shouldn’t have. You did make a bad call. But they don’t want to discuss it cleanly. They want to twist it into evidence that you’re corrupt or stupid, poison the entire well. That’s when it stops being critique and becomes something else.
I’ve had the impulse plenty of times. Some artist or blogger doing something I genuinely think is garbage, and I want to leave the cruelest comment possible, just to make sure they know someone sees through them. But I don’t, because I know where it leads. Feed one and the rest show up. And it doesn’t even feel good—it’s just this small thing eating itself.
The smart move is to not engage, and it’s right, but it’s its own kind of torture. When someone attacks you, the natural response is to defend yourself, explain, set the record straight. But the moment you do, you’ve already lost. You’re playing their game. So you learn to let it go instead. Engage with the people who are actually here in good faith, and stop wasting mental energy on people whose only goal is to derail you.
Except there’s no real solution. You can’t convert them. You can’t block them all. They’re built into the system now, especially online. You accept it. Delete the worst ones. Ignore the rest. Keep working on what you’re building instead of on people trying to wreck it.
And I’ve made peace with this much: trolls are accidental proof. If people hate you badly enough to spend their time destroying you, you’ve reached something real. You’ve built something that matters enough to make people want to attack it. Safe, small, invisible work doesn’t attract that kind of aggression. So maybe they’re accidentally right about one thing—you did something worth destroying. They just chose to be the ones trying.