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Can Civil Comments Kill the Internet Troll?
- hugh4 11y agoTwo things: 1. Journalists need to learn the difference between "trolling" and other varieties of being a jerk on the internet. Trolling is a very specific activity, of posting something you don't really believe, in order to get an angry response. It is very different to being uncivil. It's very possible to troll in a civil way ("The moon: a ridiculous liberal myth"), and most of the uncivil comments on the internet aren't trolling, they're just people being jerks, stating what they really believe in a way that isn't very nice. 2. People are, in general, pretty bad at distinguishing between "this comment is bad" and "I disagree with this comment". Letting users censor comments seems destined to lead to the development of a situation where people of a certain ideological bent eventually take over, happily censoring everything else. People of different ideological bents will get tired of having their comments deleted and will go find somewhere else.
- krapp 11y agoThis is an advertorial for a startup called Civil, which wants to crowdsource moderation with an app called Civil Comments. So to answer the title's question explicitly - no. And implicitly - no. Sites have been trying various crowdsourced moderation models for years - from the extremist moderation of Stack Overflow to the "anything that won't get us arrested is fine" attitude of 4chan/8chan. I don't believe there's any secret sauce to find.