Reflection on “this american life” about Lindy and her troll.

So after listening to this I felt many different things actually. First, I was surprised to hear Lindy say she was going to “feed the troll” by retaliating and second, I was impressed that the troll actually took the time to apologize and offer all of his personal information to her.

These things surprised me because honestly, I find trolls to be pushovers. Like, they only can act so tough because they’re online and anonymous. For her to speak out about the troll, at least the way she did it, didn’t seem like feeding them to me. From my experience with trolls, they try to word vomit their logic on you but I think it pisses them off more to notice them lightly. I feel like there’s a right and wrong way to respond to a troll as I have done both before haha. Of course, the ones I’ve dealt with hadn’t done anything so drastic to me but I suppose this is good advice anyway?

The wrong way, is to argue with them about it since most of it’s just coming from their butts and makes no sense. And if you argue long enough, they’ll begin changing what they say to make more sense and when you call them out on it they get pissed off.

The right way, in my opinion, is to just brush them off. They’ll give you a “too long, didn’t read” kind of thing about how you’re a liar and they’re right but if you let them know that their crap was “so long that you didn’t read it”, you just put them in the red and now their all butt hurt. Of course, they’ll come at you with something along the lines of “well you didn’t read it because you’re to incapable…” of something, but you can just ignore that bit and let them wallow in butt hurt by themselves.

I find myself pretty fortunate that I haven’t come into contact with too many trolls personally even though I feel like I’m online more often than a student with final papers due should be. Sometimes I think the more you put yourself out there, the more likely it’ll be that a troll will find you. Having a blog for example will probably attract a lot of trolls but for me, someone who just reads forum posts and blogs but doesn’t actually respond to anything too often wouldn’t get a lot of trolly feedback.

The sad truth of it is, I don’t post about things even if I want to in fear that some troll will make a scene about it. It’s something I feel like I should get over some day but honestly, why do I need to put my opinions all over the internet? The same as why other people have to give their opinion on my opinion on the internet? It just doesn’t seem worth it sometimes.

And here’s a thing where a thing happened 😀