I have a post on my website that attracts a good amount of attention. It’s rarely positive, high-interest attention.
Usually, its people who see the title, get personally offended, click through to my site, definitely don’t even read the whole thing, and leave a nasty comment about how woefully ignorant I am and then some.
The post is called Birkenstocks are Not Healthy for Your Feet. It’s controversial, I know.
But if you read it, you realize that i’m not being a troll or even really hating on the shoes. The whole point is that they have a time and a place, but you shouldn’t rely on them as a crutch forever.
I used to wear them myself, but I had to move on from them. Like I said though, most people don’t read the message, they just want to give an emotional reaction which is usually an unpleasant comment.
The first thing I do is give them a fair chance; I read through the full comment and decide if I will allow it or not.
I have a personal rule that if a comment is critical of me but at least constructive, I will approve it. If it’s just critical because it’s angry or offended with no construction to it, it will get deleted.
I won’t host disparaging garbage on a website that I pay to own.
So I read them and almost always delete them because they’re just that bad.
When this happens, there’s always a strong inclination to doubt yourself, reread your post to see if it’s totally wrong, investigate who this commenter is, and so on.
Stop all of that.
I have reread my post now about 20 times. It’s completely fine and fair. You’re allowed to disagree but I have decided this is the message I wanted to send out.
The ultimate advice here is to delete the comment and ignore them completely. Move on from this interaction by getting yourself busy with something else productive.
These people are not worth your valuable time as a creator.
James Altucher has a great post about a similar topic that depicts people like this as pigs — all they want to do is drag you into the mud to roll around with them in it and get all dirty.
When you get dragged into the mud, you’ve lost.
This is what happens when you reply to these people, get in arguments with them, threaten them, block them, any interaction or acknowledgement of them is getting dragged into the mud.
Your job is to stay clean. Don’t even get involved because nothing good will come of it for you.
There’s an old saying that says, “hate always comes from beneath you.”
It’s not Elon Musk sending you nasty comments, he’s busy. It’s people who are struggling in their own right. They’re just directing their anger at you for the time being.
But if you don’t give them any attention, they will move on and leave you alone.
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Previously Published on medium
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Photo credit: by Pablo Stanic on Unsplash