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These are good points on dealing with trolling as an individual. Ignoring it is the best, and most often ignored, advice. It's too easy to get emotionally dra
by mdip 11y ago
These are good points on dealing with trolling as an individual. Ignoring it is the best, and most often ignored, advice. It's too easy to get emotionally drawn into a trolling comment, which is why I've always liked the idea of sandboxing trolls in a way that allows them to think their comments are being accepted while eliminating them from the rest of the participants of the site.
At a higher level, though, sites and moderators of discussion have to participate in the reduction of trolling. Failure to do so dooms a community. I've left my share of communities, mailing lists, usenet message boards and the like due to it being tiring to participate in a discussion that devolves into name-calling and wasteful trolling. My favorite example was Digg about a decade ago. At some point the trolling problem got so bad that you couldn't leave a comment of any kind without encountering a land-mine. I remember the "straw that broke the camel's back" was when I spent a few minutes leaving a multi-sentence comment and had copy/pasted part of a sentence to a place where it made more sense. I had accidentally doubled an "and". I was met with "Learn fucking English, asshole!" and was like "huh?!". The guy read my entire comment and grammar trolled me over an obvious typo? I deleted my account shortly after that. I wasn't angry -- I just came to realize that the site stopped providing me any value.
- chris_wot 11y agoYeah, it was also what led to the death of Kuro5hin.
- elihu 11y agoI believe K5 also stopped accepting new accounts for awhile. It's a shame; there was a lot to like about how the site worked. The collaborative review process seemed like the future of how science and journalism ought to work on the Internet. Instead it became dystopian parable of how such things don't work on the Internet.
- chris_wot 11y agoYeah, that sort of happens when someone photoshops the founder's wife's head on a pornstar. Twitter style harassment before Twitter was a thing.
- kefka 11y agoNot only that, but K5 also charged for accounts. Right now, the login/password field is bugged so you have to type in the URL string to get to your account. ICU/brain dead is about right for K5 now, unfortunately.
- Qub3d 11y agoAs a younger internet participant, I'm starting to see this in Reddit (ironically, backed by Y-combinator, which i've now moved to). It seems as a site gets more and more popular, Sturgeon's Law takes effect and the site approaches a point where about 90% of everything is crap.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- qb45 11y ago> the site approaches a point where about 90% of everything is crap. 90% of human interactions are crap ;) Pre-Internet people lived in isolated bubbles and the mess we have now is just a demonstration what happens when too many people from one bubble start interacting with another.
- mdip 11y agoFunny you mention that. When I left Digg, I started participating in Reddit because it was far more civil at the time. Thinking about interactions in the last several years across several sub-reddits, it's long suffered from the same problems that wrecked Digg and as a result I've not participated in that community in quite some time. Hacker News has been pretty rigid with its community standards and though there's (legitimate) complaints about the rigidity, the trade-off encoutered from a "downvote because I disagree" vs "downvote because comment is hostile" is well within my tolerances here.