My Simple Trick to Avoid Trolls On Medium

While still interacting with the reading community

Creating content online is fun. For someone like me with generalized anxiety, writing is therapeutic.

Getting mail from readers is the highlight of my day. For real, spam me your emails, I love them all. The second best is reading comments from previous articles.

Because no one in my “real life” knows even half of my thinking, getting other people’s take on situations has been eye-opening. When I get words of encouragement, I get all the warm fuzzies.

What’s the buzzkill in all this? Trolls. Medium Trolls.

They’re the keyboard warriors who are ruthless in their criticism. They toe the line just enough to not be abusive or break Medium’s policies. But damn…they can be complete dicks.

For a while, I skipped reading any comments on my articles but that downright sucks. I don’t write on here for a living; it’s something I do on the side to release all the garbage piling up in my brain. I don’t get thousands of comments but the ones that I get, I very much want to read.

If they’re good ones. If they’re bad…I’d like to avoid reading them.

I don’t have the thickest of skins. When a Medium Troll comes after me, they’re coming after something I’ve written that comes from deep inside and isn’t shared with the rest of the world. In other words, they’re being assholes over who I am as a person.

That’s not fun. At all.

So what to do? Read all the comments so that you can get great interactions with non-dick readers but risk reading comments from Medium Trolls, or avoid reading them completely?

I came up with a simple system. This only works if you’re not someone who gets bombarded with hundreds of comments per hour. Otherwise, go laugh at your Medium millions and stop worrying about the keyboard warriors.

The notifications icon displays a backward-chronological list of activities on writing. Claps, comments, new followers, and posting of articles display in that list.

The trick to avoiding reading Medium Trolls’ comments: skim through the notifications and see if whoever has left a comment has also clapped the article. Since it’s in chronological order, it is usually a line item before or after the entry stating that someone has commented on your article.

Then, click on the notification to take you to your page. Go through and find the comment from that Medium reader while avoiding reading the others.

This strategy works because people who hate you and your article aren’t going to click the clap hand icon after reading. They’re too enraged and feel like taking their anger out in a small text box.

The readings who do post constructive or positive feedback are the ones who also clap before or after reading.

Is this a surefire method? I would say it’s been 99% successful for me in avoiding Medium Trolls. Unfortunately, that means there may be positive comments that I’m missing out on, but sometimes my self-esteem doesn’t feel like being punched in the face by strangers.