On Trolls
There’s this specific moment that gets me every time. Someone writes something mean in a comment—an attack on how you look, what you think, the work you do—and you know they’d never say it to your face. Not because they’re too polite, but because they’d lose their nerve. The anonymity is everything. Without it, they’re nobody.
I’ve gotten the full range. Comments about my appearance, some creative and some just lazy. Criticism of things I’ve written about that completely misses the point, like I haven’t thought about the bigger picture. The weird part isn’t the malice—it’s how pathetic the effort usually is. A few words, often misspelled, typed out with the seething conviction of someone who’s just found their reason to be angry that day.
You start to see patterns if you pay attention. Certain phrasings come back. The same grudges resurface. Specific people develop their own styles. If you run something online long enough, you recognize the regulars, even when they’re trying to hide. They leave traces without realizing it. And there’s this cyclical thing about it—you ban one, and another shows up. You delete their comment, and they come back with a new angle. The futility of it all is the thing that’ll drive you insane if you let it.
The temptation is always to engage. To explain yourself. To prove them wrong. To lay out exactly why their complaint makes no sense. I’ve done it. It’s never worked. The satisfying thing, I’ve found, is the opposite: just delete it. Let all their effort vanish. Don’t even acknowledge it happened. They’ll be furious, and that fury is the only proof that something actually landed, but it won’t be anything they wanted.
There’s also a difference between trolls and actual haters. Trolls are mostly just loud. They’re compensating for something—a bad day, a failed life, the fact that nobody listens to them anywhere else. But then there are people who are genuinely vicious, genuinely interested in harm. Those get deleted too, but for different reasons. They’re not looking for attention; they’re looking to hurt. That’s a line that matters.
The vast majority of people reading whatever you’ve made don’t say anything. They show up, they read, they leave. They come back. They recommend it to someone. They’re the actual audience, the reason any of this matters. The trolls are just noise on top of it. It’s easy to forget that when one of them is screaming, but the numbers tell you what’s real.
I used to think there was a solution. Some way to stop it. Now I just think trolls are a permanent fixture of putting anything into the world. The internet gave them a tool, but they’ve always existed—they’re just schoolyard bullies who found a place where consequences don’t exist. And maybe that’s the most honest thing about the whole thing: we all know better, but we keep reading them anyway.