Lessons in compassion – how to handle 'trolling'

Phewph! The last two days have been intense! It all started when I was reading some comments on one of  Jerry Banfield’s posts, and I notice this one comment kept coming up:

“Hi, all friend please upvote my post and follow me.

please comment me. davinger.

Thanks.”

I saw it about four times on several comments in one long thread. Now I am as much an anarchist and supporter of freedom of expression as the next anarchist.. but I couldn’t help but feel annoyed that someone was doing this so many times. I thought to myself, what if everyone started doing this.. what a total worthless mess the comments feeds would become. So with my Steemit protection mode activated I went and looked at his other comments and I saw a huge long list of dozens, even a hundred or so of these comments. I really felt this was not ok! So then I had a peek at his blog posts. Oh dear! Not much better. The posts were basically a never ending list of google grabbed images of pizza and girls with no writing in them at all except for the very same text. It looked like a kind of madness to me. 

I decided to write a few messages on these posts to try to show my disapproval. 

“YOU ARE NOT USING STEEMIT IN THE RIGHT WAY!

YOU HAVE ONLY COPYRIGHTED IMAGES

YOU ARE BEGGING FOR UPVOTES FROM ANY AND ALL POSTS

YOU WILL BE FLAGGED AND IN TROUBLE

PLEASE FIND ANOTHER WAY TO USE STEEMIT AND DONT MAKE IT A TOTAL MESS”

This seemed like an appropriate response. I wrote about three or four of these comments. There was no response. Nothing. So to take it to the next level, I decided to comment to people who were upvoting his posts and comments. 

“PLEASE think before you upvote. This guy is a total nuisance to Steemit.

He is spamming everywhere and writing NOTHING. All he does is steal images of Pizza or Girls and post them with the exact same comment.

"Hi, all friend please upvote my post and follow me.

please comment me. davinger.

Thanks."

Please don't support this kind of action as it is bad for Steemit.

Please remove your upvote to help deter davinger from turning Steemit into a total mess...”

That didn’t go very well, and some people got upset at me for telling them what to do! Well fair enough I guess! 

The next day I went back to check if this was still happening, and indeed there were many more comments and posts just the same. That was it! I decided to flag! It was the second time I have ever flagged someone. That is how it all started.

Suddenly I had grabbed his attention. He started commenting back at me, and accusing me of doing the same! Oh shit, he was right too! I had back in the very start of my Steemit life taken an image for the headline of some of my posts from Google. I didn’t know at that time that I had to filter images ‘labelled for reuse’. To be fair though, I had stopped doing that since I found out the rules, but he was right actually so I commented back and explained I had learned not to do this.

But it didn’t end there. Suddenly I started getting more and more of these comments that barely made sense on many of my posts!

“robot scan you, you doggggg

Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:”

And now they weren’t even true.. he was just posting these comments on everything I had posted. So I started getting quite annoyed and then flagged some more of his crazy posts and comments. 

This seemed to set off the most intense response from him that I have ever come across. He then proceeded to manifest two more Steemit accounts, and from all three account he flagged and downvoted everything that I had commented or written. He also wrote stuff like

“your pictures copyright. you crazy dog. if you flag me. I will give flag you until. until you die. you note.”

Things were starting to get out of hand, and he was also downvoting so many other people who had just commented on something I had posted. I think in total there were more than 100 flags and easily more than 100 comments on just about everything. 

It was at this point that I had to stop and feel into this situation. I started to realise that this person was more than angry. He was more than seeking revenge. He was wounded to the core and probably stayed up all night continuing to flag, comment, and spam everything he could. Quite a few others were getting annoyed and started flagging him too. The whole situation was totally out of hand. 

Now, at this point I was no longer angry. Something changed inside me. I started to realise that I was dealing with someone who was completely irrational and also clearly suffering in some way or other. I couldn’t figure out if they were just desperate for money, or just very very angry with life. I will never know the truth, which is very frustrating. Now, thank God this feeling of compassion came up in me. Why? Because had I have gotten angry things would have become very ugly for me. I would have been totally caught up in responding to his comments and would be seething at him for posting so many bad and untrue things on all my posts. I have spent months putting so much energy into Steemit and here was this total stranger messing it all up; and there was nothing I could really do to stop it.. I mean I DID ask for help and it did come, but even still it’s very hard in this wonderful anarchic Steemit world to really stop people doing anything if they are determined. 

So thankfully I was able to have compassion. I may never know why exactly this guy was continuing to post such lies everywhere despite getting so much resistance from so many people. But today I had peace in my heart, even though he was continuing to deface everything I had done. I just had to feel sorry for him, and I really did. 

This is a great lesson for me today. I don’t regret what I did, as I do believe it needed to stop. What I learned is that it’s not what we do, but how we do it. Today could have been a total nightmare for me had I have allowed myself to be too self-centred and caught up in my own story. Instead I managed to resolve the whole situation by getting the help I needed, whilst managing to remain calm and compassionate. It really felt good and also meant that I wasn’t doing crazy things back out of anger. 

So my friends, I hope you can learn with me from this experience that when we are faced with people who act very negatively or disruptively, that the worst thing we can do is get angry about it. In the end that path is going to lead us all to inner hell. If we can remain calm and with an open heart great miracles can happen. I’m not sure if this saga is over yet for him, but now tonight I will sleep well!

Oh, and maybe don’t flag people! ;-)