Experienced users already know this, although many appear to have forgotten it lately; it is very old wisdom from the earliest days of internet and even pre-internet conversation venues such as use-net or blogs with comments allowed.
The time-honored and proven way to discourage people who enter conversations in order to disrupt them is simply to ignore them. Don’t feed the trolls.
We all, in our partisan echo-chambers, experience people who come in thinking to correct us in our benighted ignorance. Or they come to mock or belittle or insult or just to be assholes. They certainly don’t come in good faith, and responding to them only makes their job, paid or otherwise, easier, which is to distract and derail our energy for our chosen candidate.
I see no point in entering a story about the candidate I don’t support. Nobody there wants to hear it and they are very unlikely to change their minds about their candidate, so why bother? I know I am not susceptible, after this much time, to argument from the other side, so why would I waste my time trying to persuade or educate someone from the other side whose mind is as made up as mine is?
What I do see, constantly, in stories about the candidate I support, is my fellow partisans wasting time and bandwidth reacting to trolls; feeding them and giving them meaning, when they should simply be ignored, whatever they say.
Additionally, when this primary is finally decided, we are all going to have to somehow come together and forget all the nastiness and work to ensure a Democratic victory, and that will be easier for me if I have not made personal the animosity that arises when the passions are high. So I don’t go troll the opposition’s stories, nor do I feed the opposition’s trolling when they come into stories about my preferred candidate.
Yes, this is sometimes hard, and I am not always the mature adult I am supposed to be here in my 8th decade, and 13th year at DKos; some people are real assholes and I really really want to blast their stupid asses, skewer them with my rapier wit and humble them with my superior insights into everything.
But hey, it’s just someone being wrong (again) on the Internet, so usually I can just take a deep breath and move on.
Just saying...
