Don’t feed the trolls. But what if you can feed off the trolls?
In Plutarch’s “How to Profit by One’s Enemies,” he advises that rather than lashing out at your enemies or completely ignoring them, you should study them and see if they can be useful to you in some way. He writes that because our friends are not always frank and forthcoming with us about our shortcomings, “we have to depend on our enemies to hear the truth.” Your enemy will point out your weak spots for you, and even if he says something untrue, you can then analyze what made him say it.
If you respond to trolls, you feed them. But: If you take their terrible idea, and articulate the opposite, good idea, without ever mentioning them at all, they’ve effectively handed you a new piece of writing, and you can be grateful to them…