Recently, someone asked me how I handle all the trolls as a Twitch streamer, YouTuber, and podcaster. They told me they quit doing their own stream because of all the trolls. I've had a ton of experience with people trolling, saying nasty things, even writing big news stories out there that are pretty hurtful. So here's how I handle trolls today. If you're a streamer or creator online, this will be really helpful for you.
Start with why you're doing this
The very first thing I do is think about why I'm doing what I'm doing. Why am I in my studio on a Sunday, going live, recording, and putting this out? Why am I doing this instead of hanging out with my family, cutting my grass, or anything else I could be doing?
Well, I see that I've been, through my own choices, uniquely crafted to be a live streamer who plays video games and makes these kinds of inspirational teaching videos. This is part of my life's work. This is a gift I have to give to others, and it doesn't need to be given to all 7 billion people on this planet directly. Me giving just this one video or podcast episode to you, if that makes a difference in your life, then we're all connected, and that makes a difference in everybody's lives you're connected to, and so on.
The key thing is thinking, why am I here doing what I'm doing? And for me, there's nothing I'd rather be doing right now. I love having these conversations. They're helpful for my own growth and accountability. And I love knowing that even if one person finds something useful in this, then that's made a genuine difference. By comparison, I've also made videos that a lot of people watched, and I don't know if even one person got anything really useful out of them. So thinking about why you do what you do really makes a big difference.
Because if you're just trying to live stream and you're getting sucked into this fantasy of playing video games, making a bunch of money, and being a big deal, which I've certainly gotten sucked into, then handling trolls is very much part of the job. It will test whether this is really what you want to do, or what you're made to do. Clearly I'm made to do this, because over the years I've faced tens of thousands of nasty, trolling comments and I'm still here.
How I used to let people troll for the views
For most of the time I've been a creator online, I cared so much about maximizing my views that I let people say whatever they wanted. A lot of other content creators, like where I'm at now, will ban you the moment you post something nasty, critical, or irrelevant, or it gets removed right away. One way I got myself to go viral on Facebook is I let people troll as much as they wanted to.
That really grew my streams. Somebody who would normally go on someone else's stream, say one nasty thing, and get banned, then go look for another stream to be nasty on, would instead sit on my stream for like 30 minutes and troll. Then their friends would get involved, and that would get me a whole bunch more views.
Unfortunately, that also left me feeling the effects of all that after my livestream. A lot of us like to think, oh, people saying nasty things doesn't bother me, I'm fine, it doesn't matter, I'm not affected. But after a lot of those livestreams where there were tons of people chatting and lots of people trolling, I felt pretty bad afterward. Our minds seem to be wired to put a much higher priority and attention on negative stimuli.
Why our minds latch onto the negative
Think of it in a prehistoric context. You're in the middle of a jungle, in the midst of all kinds of beauty. You've got beautiful trees, lush grass, and the breeze is blowing nicely. If you just pay attention to all that and you don't notice there's a pair of tiger eyes watching you, getting ready to eat you, then you're probably not going to survive and thrive. You're going to get eaten because you didn't pay enough attention to that negative detail, that threatening part of your environment.
Today, we have very little true threat in our environment. But all these things in our lives have been conditioned to take advantage of that wiring all the time, because people who are scared go into survival mode and just run, fight, or do whatever they're told to do. People who are not in survival mode, like I don't exist in survival mode most of the time, can't be very easily manipulated by fear anymore.
Over the last couple of years, we've seen people get manipulated by fear a lot. Stay in your house. Wear this thing. Get this thing shot. And people just stuck in this fear mode: okay, I'll do whatever you tell me to. I'm not in fear mode. I'm like, yeah, I don't think I need to do that. That sounds stupid, I'm not doing that. Our culture has essentially taken advantage of this negative stimuli and fear mode to get a lot of us into survival mode, where we're more compliant and less resistant to authority.
Hurt people hurt people
This manifests in people who are afraid and in survival mode. If you're wondering why people get out there and just say nasty things, well, people who are in survival mode and feel bad are people who are hurt, and hurt people go hurt other people. So a lot of the trolls you see online are just other people having a bad day. They're in fear. They're in survival mode themselves. They're scrolling through some of these platforms, just looking for more reasons to feel bad. If you asked them, they wouldn't tell you that. But if you look at their behavior, that's clearly what's going on.
To be fair, a troll is a person who's just stuck in fear and survival mode, disoriented and confused. My kids get into it sometimes, and they're just screaming and shouting at each other. You could think of the people who are trolling as essentially in that same mindset my kids are in, but they're not outwardly screaming and shouting anymore. They're just sitting there on their phones, essentially screaming and shouting and trying to slap and hurt other people through a comment.
I stay off the platforms that thrive on toxic energy
One of the biggest things I've done is stay off platforms that seem to thrive on this kind of toxic energy. Facebook seems to be founded in this survival-mode, fearful, superficial, toxic energy. And they bought Instagram, which is another platform like that. You'll notice that people who are feeling bad and trying to distract themselves from it will often just mindlessly scroll through Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. TikTok seems to be founded on this too: people in fear and survival mode desperately looking for any kind of distraction, any kind of thing to help them feel a little bit better.
The price you pay for that is it becomes an addiction. Sometimes you see something on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or Twitter that makes you feel better, but you also become addicted to these things that draw out more anger in you. Then you don't even think you're the one trolling, but you're sitting there writing a comment feeling justified, when from somebody else's point of view, you're trolling. So one thing I do is stay off Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. These platforms, to me, seem to be a drain on my energy. I went deeper on my reasons in my honest take on whether TikTok is worth your time, and my answer there is no.
On YouTube, I'm even starting to go out of sync with the YouTube homepage, which seems to have a lot of this same energy on it. The YouTube subscriptions feed unfortunately has a lot of the same thing. But if I just search YouTube for something specific, that can be very helpful. On YouTube and on podcasts, I can really aim in at exactly what I want, and I don't have to get distracted that much.
And on Twitch, we've got a nice community. If you're here to troll, I'm not listening to it. On the first comment, I'm going to time you out, a 10-minute timeout where you can't chat. If you come back and do it again, you'll get banned. I now have standards. I refuse to let myself be attacked, and it's amazing.
I've become very sensitive to energy
I'm very sensitive to energy now. You can often tell just by the energy of a comment, like the words themselves contain it. I swear certain people could say the exact same words and they wouldn't trigger that certain energy, the one that's there when somebody is sitting in a nasty mindset.
This is why the only things I read now are my Twitch chat and my Discord chat, because in both it's very easy to shut down that first comment and not let it snowball. On platforms like Facebook, when I used to stream there, it was so easy for one person to come in and drop one comment, and then even if you banned them, their friends could see the stream. Even if you tried to moderate, there were still always people saying nasty things all the time, because Facebook is a platform that thrives and profits off of that nasty fighting, fear, survival-mode energy. We had streams where we would ban like a hundred people, just constantly banning, and there was practically an endless supply of them.
I set hard boundaries now
I used to try to handle trolls with love and be so nice. But look, if you have nothing nice to say and I'm reading it, you need to go somewhere else. It's like if somebody came into my house and was being nasty: I'd say please leave, and if they didn't leave right away, I'd call the police and get them out of there. I have this standard now.
My live stream and my online presence have actually been the last place I've set hard boundaries. In the rest of my life, I already have hard boundaries. With my wife, either we're going to have a very kind, loving, mutually supportive relationship, or we're not going to be together. There's no in between. I would rather be by myself and available to look for a partner who might be fantastic, than be stuck with a partner who's going to be nasty to me, put me down, and tease me anything more than a little occasionally.
It's the same with my kids. Most of the time, we have a very loving, happy, supportive, positive relationship. Occasionally we get a little irritable with each other and are a little mean. So I've now learned to bring that same boundary to my online communities. If you'd like to be part of a community where those boundaries are the whole point, you can join the Jerry Banfield Family and connect with me directly there.
Why I'll time out even a regular viewer sometimes
I've also learned that if somebody is a very regular viewer, in here every day on my Twitch stream or in my Discord, and they're having a bad day, it might actually help them for me to time them out and not let them keep posting a bunch more nasty things. Because when we go say a bunch of nasty things to somebody else, it actually makes us feel bad. We'll say it's about them, we'll try to project it onto them, but it leaves us feeling bad.
I've noticed in the past that some of the people who really loved my stream, and then said a bunch of nasty things one day, kind of get stuck in that spot. It's like they have to keep saying nasty things over and over again to justify what they said before. They go from loving what I create to hating what I create, and then they have to keep hating it to justify that they hated it before. Otherwise, they'd have to look at, well, why were you such a jerk that one day on the stream? Some people came back and apologized.
I don't read my YouTube comments anymore
I also don't read my YouTube comments anymore. On YouTube it's too easy for people to come along and throw out some nasty comment. They're not following me, they just saw one video they found in search. So I don't read my YouTube comments.
I do not allow trolling on my Twitch streams or my Discord. These are closed-access communities where you have to be a follower to chat on Twitch. Sure, somebody can come by, but if you say something I don't like, I'm live, I'm right there to see it, and you're going to get stopped right away. Whereas YouTube is kind of open trolling. There are so many people and so many chances to get trolled that I just don't read the comments.
So I've learned to pay as little attention to the trolls as possible. In environments like YouTube where it's open trolling, just don't read the comments. And set an expectation: if you're watching a video on YouTube, I'm not going to read your comment. You can post whatever you want for other people to potentially see. But if you want me to see your comment, you need to be on my Twitch stream or in my Discord channel.
So I keep my attention off of trolls, off of people who have nasty things to say, and off of the areas where they consistently come in and I can't stop them. On YouTube, even if I ban somebody right after they post the first nasty thing, I still saw it. YouTube is so open that almost every day, somebody comes through and has to get their opinion out on my channel. Somebody will post on my AA video, well, you're violating the 11th tradition. I don't need to hear that, because I obviously have my own opinion about that subject, and I don't care if your opinion disagrees with mine. I'm putting my stuff out there, and I don't need to see whether you disagree with it or not.
I can sit there and ban somebody every day on YouTube, and somebody else will come along and post something else. On Twitch and Discord, thankfully, that's not an issue, because most people who are going to come along and troll are not going to try to join my Discord server or actually come into Twitch. Some have come into Twitch, but you just ban them immediately, and there's no issue. If you want to go deeper on this mindset, I dug into why I see criticism as a sign of success you can mostly ignore, and I keep that whole conversation going across my YouTube Coaching playlist.
My system for handling trolls online
So this is how I handle trolls online now, after trying every different approach.
Number one: don't show up in places where you can't help but get trolled. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter.
Number two: avoid reading things where you can't avoid getting trolled, like the YouTube comments.
Number three: stay grounded in closed communities like Twitch and Discord. Twitch is a little more open, but it doesn't usually attract all the trolls. Sometimes you have to ban several people in a row, but that's not common. I've had a lot of streams where I haven't had to ban anybody on Twitch, and it's been really nice. If this resonated with you, you might also like everything I shared about what I get frustrated about as a creator, because boundaries are a big part of staying in the game.
I hope this experience I've shared has been useful for you.