You don't have to respond to every single comment.
As of lately I have been feeling very Zen about my internet comment habits. In the past my commenting diet was comprised of YouTube, Facebook & Reddit and after leaving behind the wormhole that is Facebook and adopting a new work-flow for watching YouTube videos my comment anxiety has dropped massively.
But the elephant in the room remained: Reddit, and boy oh boy how much as our relationship changed. First in our honeymoon I subscribed to all the subreddits, scrolled down the comments and replied with memes and joy. Now that the dust has settled I see through the toxicity.
For every well thought out change my view post there’s a hundred reactionary hate mobs going after Tati or whoever the internet has decided needs to burn.
On a good reddit day I would find a good post, comment my opinion briefly, then get down-voted to hell, socially pressured to explain my opinion more thoroughly to show that the commenters have completely misunderstood my point, write a wall of text and finally get ignored.
This cycle was stressing me out, so after I created my new account and left all my comment history behind I found time to breath in and out on the interwebz. ah! can you smell the silicon from here?
Before my internet power user days the reply text box was weirdly special: It was a place to think out loud and analyze my point of view. It was almost like speaking to God through prayer: You would have a very special idea in your head and through the ritual of typing gigantic paragraphs on the keyboard only to re-write your whole comment you would communicate with this behemoth that is the internet.
You would type your reply not knowing if someone would listen or if your prayers would come true. In this way the process of internet comments felt grandiose and unlike anything else online.
After writing comment after comment the magic begun to fade, and the text box below each website sparked anxiety instead of the prayer-like powerless wonder that it used to.
Because of my comment detox I feel no urge to respond to every word in a bullet-point manner, and by turning off all comment related notifications I have found time to think in the real world, after my detox I would think out loud by talking to friends about the comments that stuck around in my head instead of thinking out loud in the comment text box.
Suddenly my responses begun to flow. No longer would I think my argument through isolated inside my commuter but in the middle of a walk or bus ride. Now I can feel the quality of my ideas begin to flourish, I feel intellectually and emotionally satisfied with my walls of text, I even seem to come off as smarter than before.
Comments used to make me feel powerless but wonderful like in prayer, after the color faded they felt powerless and anxious.
Now I feel Zen, like I’m one with myself and my keyboard.