Systems For Handling Online Hate
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Bloom's three-part protocol for absorbing negativity when something you post turns hostile, developed partly from Tim Ferriss and others and partly from his own experience. First, detect and disengage: on Twitter, quote tweets ticking up fast alongside retweets is the early signal that a pile-on is starting, and the response is to mute the conversation so no notifications arrive at all. Second, reframe the attacker: he has never met a happy person who sat down to write something extremely negative about a stranger, so the appropriate default is empathy rather than retaliation. Third, zoom out to your actual life — the man-in-the-arena posture that if you can't take the heat you shouldn't be in the kitchen. Underlying all of it is a deliberate refusal to produce rage bait in the first place.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Learn the early-warning signal
Bloom watches for quote tweets ticking up fast alongside retweets — that ratio, rather than raw volume, is what tells you something is turning hostile.
- 2
Mute the conversation immediately
Not later, and not after reading a few. Muting kills the notification stream entirely: 'out of sight, out of mind'. Bloom describes being blissfully ignorant while the pile-on ran.
Pro tip Mute before you're upset, not after — the signal appears earlier than the emotional damage.
- 3
Stop reading comments once it turns
Bloom's stated first principle is simply avoiding the comments when things take a turn for the negative. Note that a wave of quote tweets often drives more people to see the idea positively anyway.
- 4
Default to empathy
Assume something is going on in the attacker's life. Bloom relays a friend who replied kindly to a hostile message and learned the sender's wife had just been diagnosed with cancer.
Pro tip A short 'hope you're all right' costs nothing and occasionally converts an enemy into a person.
Watch out This is a stance for your own regulation, not an obligation to engage with everyone who attacks you.
- 5
Zoom out to your actual life
Bloom's third move, which he calls slightly arrogant: after reading something cruel, he walked back into a room containing his son, his wife and his home, and the comment shrank to its real size.
- 6
Accept the arena, and don't feed it
If you put yourself out there you will draw some of this — the Teddy Roosevelt man-in-the-arena point. Bloom pairs acceptance with never attacking back and never posting deliberate rage bait for views.
In the wild
Bloom tweeted that he and his wife had started a monthly check-in ritual. The quote tweets began climbing fast — replies telling him he was an idiot, that he was the devil, that he hoped-you-get-divorced, that needing this meant the marriage was already over. His response was procedural: he saw the ratio move, decided he stood by the idea, and muted the conversation so he'd never get a notification. When Ali messaged to check he was okay, Bloom's answer was that he was blissfully ignorant. Meanwhile the pile-on drove the idea to more people, and he received a stream of messages from people saying they'd tried it.
→ Zero emotional cost to the creator, and net-positive distribution of the original idea.
Bloom describes a conversation with a friend who received a hostile message online. Instead of firing back, the friend sent a short note to the sender saying he hoped he was all right and that everything was fine. The sender replied apologising and explaining that his wife had recently been diagnosed with cancer, and that the way the original post was worded had rubbed him the wrong way. The friend's reflection to Bloom was that he would have replied really negatively otherwise, and would never have known there was a genuinely difficult moment behind the attack.
→ A hostile exchange defused, and a demonstration of the empathy default in practice.
Common mistakes
Reading the comments to gauge severity
By the time you've assessed how bad it is, you've absorbed it. The quote-tweet signal exists precisely so you can mute before reading.
Replying in kind
Bloom's stated policy is never attacking back. Retaliation both extends the pile-on's life and forfeits the empathy default that occasionally resolves it.
Manufacturing controversy for reach
Bloom is explicit that he won't throw out rage bait for views. Deliberately generating hostility means running this protocol permanently instead of occasionally.
From the transcript
“So, in any case, I saw the quote tweets started to tick up. First thing I did was I muted it. So I muted the…”
“that person is not a happy person. I've never met someone happy who has sat down and written something extremely negative about a person they…”
“you should default to empathy when you see someone react that way”
From the episode
9 Systems To Build A Life Of Abundance - Sahil Bloom
Sahil Bloom