Arthur Chu has won a couple of Jeopardy episodes with an eye for strategy. Along the way he has received a ton of abuse from the inter webs. He reports in a interview with Slate that his wife encouraged him to engage with the trolls.
I have to give my wife credit for this because she’s a strong believer that dragging trolls into the sunlight to name and shame them is better than ignoring them, and the way she was kind of goading me by retweeting all the offensive tweets and getting me to reply to them got me to see that there were two choices—retreat behind a rock and wait for the trolling to blow over, or consciously engage the trolls, take control of the conversation and own my image as a nerdy rumpled “Jeopardy! jerk” and embrace it. And the latter has turned out to be a lot of fun—and in the end generated a lot more positivity than negativity, though it would’ve been hard to believe that’s how it would’ve ended up that first night of angry people calling me out.
I tend to think that likeliness of success with trolls increases with social status, but this is a good snapshot of the ‘feed the trolls’ argument.
Life of refinement 