Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me....
Honestly, trolls are just people seeking attention and trying to get arousal out of people. They say things online to get you to respond angrily or in a hostile way for amusement. I know if that was me, I would do the same exact thing as most of the population and respond in an angry way to the insensitive comments these people make, but the thing is then I would be doing exactly what they want. Adding fuel to the fire only makes things worse. I've been thinking about this for a while and the best thing in my opinion would be to ignore what the trolls say because what they say doesn't matter. They are usually attention seeking, unimportant people who want to ruin other people's lives by making unnecessary comments. So the best thing to do when you get trolled would be doing NOTHING. Don't respond and think to yourself that their opinion doesn't matter because they really don't. I mean that's the only way I see people can handle trolling but I'm open to other people's ideas. I really want to know what other say about how to handle trolling.
I agree with you when you talk about "adding fuel to the fire". It honestly is not worth it to respond... What do we gain by responding? Nothing. We are only satisfying them and making us more of a target. I honestly think this whole "trolling" idea is dumb. I am glad that people want to waste their lives doing absolutely noting useful. They're just contributing more hate to society. If we wanted someone's opinion, then we would have asked.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with everything you said. I know it is hard not to respond back when you are being trolled and I honestly would unintentionally feed into their nonsense too. But you are right that you should do nothing and just leave it alone because eventually they will get bored and stop messing with you. But hopefully they just stop trolling in general and realize they are wasting their time.
ReplyDeleteWhile it is true that responding to troll will only make it worse since it will give them attention and legitimacy that they want., I still don't think doing nothing is the best solution.
ReplyDeleteYou said that "their opinion doesn't matter because they really don't", and while that is true, what about other people's opinion. One of the ways trolls tried to annoy people is to spread lies about them. When the post is convincing or look legitimate enough, people might just believe it and start forming a different opinion of you. In that situation, would ignoring the post be the best solution?
Secondly, while the reporting abuses system on social media might be flawed, it still a pretty useful tools to use against trolls. This way, not only will it benefited you, it will also save others from having to deal with the person and ultimately make the site a better place.
Also, while most of the trolls will just go away after they got tired of this, some of them legitimately have goals to achieve, and those are the worst type of trolls. Some of these will evolve into a bigger issues such as "PawWestDonzo" in West's story. Because of this, we should learn to recognize which trolls is which and deal with them appropriately and not just ignore all of them regardless of their action.
Unfortunately, most website do not have proper tools to deal with trolls, but I believe that doing something is better than doing nothing at all.