when I see someone who is seething with hatred at me calling me names, I think:

1. This person is emotionally-driven

2. I have triggered this person

3. This person wants to ruin my mood and invoke and emotional reaction in me to punish me for triggering them

4. This person cannot be reasoned with, nor do they deserve the effort. I'm not here to parent them.

I have dealt with people like this on reddit for years. When I was new to reddit, I would go back and forth with literal autists (I later checked their post histories) for extended periods of time, pulled into their world of shit. I realized that engaging was always the wrong answer, and that every minute of my life wasted on such people was a fail on my part.

While people try to pretend to be cool and act like nothing ever affects them, the truth is that people can and do get under my skin, and it will always be that way. It required emotional and mental energy from me to counter-act their impact and ACT like they don't affect me, but they do. Being in denial about it isn't helpful. Constantly being barraged with insults and vitriol wears on a person, even if it is only an individually tiny amount. It's like a poison that accumulates. Now, if you're trolling, that's different. If you're trolling, it becomes hilarious to trigger people. Anyway, I adapted as follows:

1. I almost always activate IRD on my comments on reddit, especially when I know I am going to trigger people, especially in libtard subs, which is almost all of them. I simply do not care about the responses. I said my piece and I'm not going to change my view because of hostile replies.

2. On r-4chan, the main sub I comment on because no one approves me on r-KIA2, I noticed that when my comment is blowing up I get overwhelmingly positive replies, and then when I'm solidly at the top, I get overwhelmingly negative ones. This is because when I make it to the top, people who agree simply add another upvote instead of replying. People who are mad know their downvote is like pissing into the ocean and will have no impact, so they feel compelled to talk shit to increase their impact.

3. Literally every single negative comment on reddit = blocked. 0 fucks given. Mature disagreement is fine, but anyone lashing out or talking shit = blocked. This actually does wonders at improving things over time. After you've blocked a few dozen haters, you actually will have killed off the majority of your downvoters, which means your comments get more traction and rise faster, so they reach greater heights. It's actually really awesome. It also reduces the number of reports against you since, again, you're blocking your haters from even seeing you. Unfortunately all blocking does on here is IRD as to that one person. They can still see, downvote, and reply to your comments, you just don't get it in your inbox. Very weak.