Not every opinion about you deserves a reply. Plenty don’t even deserve a read.

Attention is the one thing you actually control in these situations, and it gets spent before you notice. Replying keeps a comment alive, but reading something you already know will be unpleasant has a cost too, since the sentence lives in your head long after the person forgot writing it. Some things are best left unopened. That is budgeting rather than cowardice.

When you see something coming, decide before you look whether anything in it could possibly be useful. If not, close it and tell a friend if it stings.