How to Counter-Troll to Defend your Substack using AI

A bit of trolling never hurt anyone, and we mustn't be afraid to welcome our non-contributing guests! After all, we are so very honored by their engagement with our message! Come in, come in!

We know how this story goes. We know the low quality content, the monetization, the content hacks, and the advertisers are encroaching upon our quality space. We know the trolls are lurking in the shadows, waiting to strike and armed with practice from other platforms. But the past does not determine the future, and we have prescience, in this last of the meaningful spaces on a dead internet.

None of us want Substack to end up toxic, crowded out by bad actors. If we are not proactive, we will be reactive and it will be too late. The results are in on every other social platform out there and we have reliable metrics on the timeline. That’s why I’m here and not there.

Substack has hope built into the very structure of its community: writers are in control. Not advertisers, not moderators or commentors. Not even likes or views. It’s us, as it should be, and we should band together with a pre-meditated strategy of dealing with the enemy.

Determined not to let a single word typed online go to waste, and desirous of helping every human who approaches me as well as my holdout enclave here on the dead internet, I decided to welcome a recent guest to the comments section of one of my notes. It appeared to be a beleaguered exile from the crumbling haven of Reddit, in the far off corporate landscape of Conde Naste.

I love trolling. I love trolls, and deep down, I have a healthy respect for the profession. I regret that some are so angry — it sucks to be bad at something you want to do so passionately — but there are some wonderful trolls who are just having fun — like me! So let this be a lesson to my readers on how to deal with trolls, deal with me, and use AI to enhance your ability to engage with humans presenting themselves to you online.

This is not Reddit or Twitter. This is my Substack. I have a fucking domain name. When you comment or subscribe to me, you are my guest and I'm your host, here to entertain you. But I have more guests than just you — I don’t have a ‘community’, I have an audience, and if you decide to rock the boat, and try to embarrass me in a petition to be my new jester, you've just volunteered for a very noble position in court: the subject of my full attention.

In this paid post, I break down a comments exchange typical of online culture, and analyze it using high level prompts on ChatGPT 4o. It is for paid subscribers. If you are a troll, you are are quite welcome to fuck around and find out — if you pay. Welcome to Intellipunk.