Recently, Lisa Barone of Outspoken Media wrote a wonderful post about Internet trolls. You know? Those fools who waste their lives trying to make others feel bad so they can feel better about themselves.
Over time, I have learned to ignore all these. In fact, now I get a huge kick out of deleting or blocking these fools. That's step 1. Step 2 has been a bit more difficult for me. See, even though I don't ever respond to these creeps, there is something about their words that stick somewhere in the back of my brain. It then festers there and starts influencing my actions.
A recent example of this happened when I wrote a post titled "10 Awesome Android Apps You Don't Know About". I knew when I wrote that title that I would get at least one jerk writing me about how they've heard about all of those apps and how dumb I was for posting such an article. Still, the post was intended to be for the non-powerusers who use Android, not the people who load their phone up with 500 apps. With that in mind, I finished the post with the original title and sent it out.
As expected, after an hour I had a few comments where people told me "Idiot! I have 8 out of those 10 apps!" and "Dude, you're a fag if you think anybody can get anything from this piece of garbage article!".
These comments, though nasty and came from jerkwads, caused me to second guess myself. I thought, maybe at least there was some truth to what they were saying. Everybody has seen probably seen these apps. I then changed the title to say "10 Awesome Android Apps" then went on about my day. What I didn't know at the time was the article had already gained quite a bit of popularity on social media under the original title. People were thumbing it up! Since I changed the title, the permalink for the article got changed as well, and the users who arrived after the change received a 404 error instead of my glorious words.
Had I stuck with my original gut feeling about the title and not let anybody influence me, many more people would've seen and appreciated my post. By the time I changed the title back, folks on the Interwebs couldn't find it anymore.
Once you make up your mind about a post, stick with it, and don't let the jerks change anything about it. I'm gonna do that from now on, and you should too!