Recently, Lisa Barone of Outspoken Media wrote a wonderful post about Internet trolls. You know? Those fools who waste their lives trying to make others feel bad so they can feel better about themselves.
Since my blogs have grown, I have had an increasing number of jealous trolls posting things in the comments sections of my posts. I’ve also had a few hateful tweets directed my way. They vary from “I can’t believe how you contradict yourself…” to straight up “You are stupid…”
Over time, I have learned to ignore all these. In fact, now I get a huge kick out of deleting or blocking these fools. That’s step 1. Step 2 has been a bit more difficult for me. See, even though I don’t ever respond to these creeps, there is something about their words that stick somewhere in the back of my brain. It then festers there and starts influencing my actions.
A recent example of this happened when I wrote a post titled “10 Awesome Android Apps You Don’t Know About”. I knew when I wrote that title that I would get at least one jerk writing me about how they’ve heard about all of those apps and how dumb I was for posting such an article. Still, the post was intended to be for the non-powerusers who use Android, not the people who load their phone up with 500 apps. With that in mind, I finished the post with the original title and sent it out.
As expected, after an hour I had a few comments where people told me “Idiot! I have 8 out of those 10 apps!” and “Dude, you’re a fag if you think anybody can get anything from this piece of garbage article!”.
These comments, though nasty and came from jerkwads, caused me to second guess myself. I thought, maybe at least there was some truth to what they were saying. Everybody has seen probably seen these apps. I then changed the title to say “10 Awesome Android Apps” then went on about my day. What I didn’t know at the time was the article had already gained quite a bit of popularity on social media under the original title. People were thumbing it up! Since I changed the title, the permalink for the article got changed as well, and the users who arrived after the change received a 404 error instead of my glorious words.
Had I stuck with my original gut feeling about the title and not let anybody influence me, many more people would’ve seen and appreciated my post. By the time I changed the title back, folks on the Interwebs couldn’t find it anymore.
Once you make up your mind about a post, stick with it, and don’t let the jerks change anything about it. I’m gonna do that from now on, and you should too!
May I share a small observation? Also notice about trolls that they really know far less than they try to make you think. So many of them try to impress by picking up a little lingo and throwing it around. When you get to the heart of the matter you often times discover their feet/brains of clay