When you spend hours writing scripts, lighting scenes, recording and editing the perfect video. You then export it, upload it, and watch as the views grow. Then you open your notifications and read the first toxic, negative comment.

Whether it’s a blunt “your video is rubbish”, a nasty attack on your appearance or pedantic trolling every mistake in your 10-minute video, negative comments are a shortcut to ruining the rest of your day.

For video creators, online negativity is difficult to deal with. Trolls can criticise your work, creative vision, and if you’re the one in front of the came, your face, voice and personality are fair game too.

A hard lesson to learn is that hate comments can come with algorithmic success. If you aren’t seeing trolls in the comments, it could indicate that your videos aren’t pushing outside of your core subscribers yet. But when the hate arrives, it could be an indication that the algorithm is pushing your content to the broader viewer pool.

You will never be able to control what people write on the internet, but you can control how you protect your channels and profiles. Let’s look at how to handle this like a pro.

Don’t fall into the troll trap

The overwhelming urge to put a troll in their place can be insanely strong. You have to resist this completely. A troll doesn’t want a logical debate; they crave your attention. If you reply to a negative comment, you’ve fallen straight into their trap and given them exactly what they wanted.

  • You reward bad behaviour: By giving the troll the time of day, they now have access to you.
  • You boost the toxicity: If you get into it on a 15-comment argument thread with a troll, the algorithm will pin the comment right at the very top of your comment section for every single new viewer to see, based on user engagement.

The only response to give a troll is silence.

Use your tools

Gone are the days of having to manually police your comment section. Every major video platform now has built-in tools to help you manage the moderation and your mental health.

  • Blocked words: Go into your settings and build a custom list of banned words. Make sure to include common insults, derogatory words and maybe even some catch-all negative words like “cringe,” “trash,” or “terrible.” The platform should automatically send it to your review queue and hide it from public view entirely without notifying the commenter.
  • Hide/Mute: This tool is the final boss of tools in your arsenal. Instead of blocking someone entirely, hide them. They can still act as normal, like watching your videos or leaving comments, but nobody else can see it. They yell into the void for eternity, completely unaware they’ve been shoved on mute.
  • Filters: If you get a video that suddenly blows up, and the comments are all of a sudden becoming overwhelming, you can adjust your community settings to set all comments to human review before they appear under your video. You can then decide to check them when you get back some of your mental energy, or get one of your lovely pals or a moderator to go through them all for you.

Reframe your thinking

Its only natural to focus on the one bad comment rather than the hundreds of supportive ones. In psychology, this is called the negativity bias – our brains are hardwired to scan for threats.

If a toxic comment gets to you, try to look at it from a pure data standpoint:

A user just viewed my content, engaged and spent time writing a comment. Their view counted, and their comment helped to signal to the algorithm that my video is an engagement driver.

To the algorithm, a comment is a comment. Ironically, the people hating on your videos are actually helping push your content to a wider audience of potential real fans.

Keep recording

Not everyone is going to like you or your content style, but this is the same for the biggest YouTubers in the world. Art and entertainment are entirely subjective.

Putting yourself on camera and uploading it to the internet requires a massive amount of courage – something the anonymous troll hiding behind a default profile picture will never understand.

Use the tools at your disposal to filter out the noise, protect your mental health, and keep hitting the record button. Your community is defined by the fans who stick around to support you, not the drive-by hecklers trying to slow you down.

Stop risking your channel’s revenue and momentum on a flawed system.

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