Thanks for the shout-out and for speaking about this dynamic. I do ignore some trolls who are so irrational that it literally makes no sense to engage with them, but a lot of them I do comment back because I know that what they really want is to shut me up. Since I've been clapping back at them, I get a lot less of them - perhaps because I'm not as fun a mark as some people.

Every once in a great while I've actually changed someone's mind. That's pretty rare, but I also see lots of things in my weekly stats where my response was read but not commented on or clapped for. That tells me that a bunch of sympathetic haters decided that they didn't have the goods or the inclination to tangle with me, and those stats always make me smile.