11–15 of 15 posts
There are many strategies in fighting trolls. Ghost bans, peer pressure or peer effort (downvotes). Make them think they are doing something. My formula for dealing with trolls: Troll effort > Self effort.
"Shunning" has historically proven to be one of the harshest and most effective ways to reduce someone's status within a community. If you ignore that person on IRC, block them on Twitter, don't mention or reference that person in your blog posts or comments, etc, then that's your vote against them. If everyone did this, the true "trolls" would be long gone, but by invoking their names over and over, they remain pote…
This is also why I quickly realized that my troll list initiative was seriously misguided. And why I now vow to never again mention a troll by name ;-)
Some thoughts about trolls: (1) Any fine poster who is even slightly unkind will pick up trolls, like ivy on a great tree (2) It follows from (1) that if you attract trolls then this is a sign that you are a good poster -- yay (3) The ability to tolerate trolls in the sense of not being angry with them is a measure of your self-confidence. (4) You feed and retain trolls them by responding negatively to them. You 'des…
Why is powerful trolling indistinguishable from good criticism? Can one not provide good criticism in a non-trolling way?
Agreed with (3), (4) and (6).
Some thoughts about trolls: (1) Any fine poster who is even slightly unkind will pick up trolls, like ivy on a great tree (2) It follows from (1) that if you attract trolls then this is a sign that you are a good poster -- yay (3) The ability to tolerate trolls in the sense of not being angry with them is a measure of your self-confidence. (4) You feed and retain trolls them by responding negatively to them. You 'des…
Is it necessary to be unkind, even slightly? If not, it would not follow that attracting trolls is a sign you are a good poster. Why is powerful trolling indistinguishable from good criticism? Can one not provide good criticism in a non-trolling way? Agreed with (3), (4) and (6).
No, sure, it isn't. However, one can write a useful reply in terms of content without being aware one is being unkind.
In such cases it will feel something like 'wow, I'm so clever today' or 'he deserves a good solid fisking'.
The trolls are useful in that they bring this problem into awareness. Kindness/decency is a requirement for continued discussion, which is at least as important as discussion itself.
Back in the days when people used Usenet for discussion, newsreaders had a killfile with which you could stop hearing from that particular person ever again (unless they changed their name). That's a feature I dearly miss from today's HTML-based discussion areas.
I met my last trolls on Google Buzz, so I created extension to Chrome which was (and still is ;-)) removing comments from those people from my stream. So even if they are writing something in other people Buzzes I simply didn't see it :-) [normal block in Buzz works only in this way that it blocks only given person from commenting on your posts]. So I think HTML based discussion areas aren't as bad ;-) you can still…
Also, if everybody knows that everybody's news client has a killfile, then there is a stronger incentive not to troll than when all you know is that some clever developer could theoretically write a site-specific script to hide HTML comments.