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It is unfortunate, but learning to disregard trolls (and serious personal attacks that you don't find helpful) is worthwhile. Getting upset about that kind of t
by curi 19y ago
It is unfortunate, but learning to disregard trolls (and serious personal attacks that you don't find helpful) is worthwhile. Getting upset about that kind of thing is a large cost (even if it just distracts you for a couple hours per incident).
- pg 19y agoWatching what happened at Reddit convinced me that the solution is not to learn to disregard trolls, but to exclude them. They poison the atmosphere of a community, and drive away the more thoughtful members. And while you can make free speech arguments for them as you can for spam, in practice trolls are almost as distinct from other posters as spam is from ordinary email. Every successful community has rules of conduct. And rules are probably even more necessary when the members are anonymous.
- curi 19y agoOh, we are talking about different issues. We can have a policy for a forum as a whole that aims to exclude trolls, and also develop personal skills to ignore them. I don't want to be personally dependent on effective forum maintainers, so it's important for me to be able to disregard trolls in the instances they get past the forum's safeguards.
- pkaler 19y agoThe First Amendment (and the Bill of Rights) is a contract between the government of the United States and its citizens. Free speech doesn't really have a meaningful definition outside of that contract. Since you are the benevolent leader of this community you define the rules of conduct. For forums that I moderate, I am very aggressive with locking threads when even an ounce of negativity is present. I prefer to be very terse with my explanations too. I have my standard set of reasons and try not to elaborate to much. I'll finish the thread with a very terse final post. Locked: Spam. Locked: Negative. Locked: Troll. Locked: Offtopic. But this probably wouldn't scale to reddit size. People would probably try to get threads locked on purpose to quell discussion about topics they didn't agree with (especially politics).
- robg 19y agoI'm hopeful that by changing the rules, you can transform the incentives for trolling behavior from a force of evil to something more productive. We all have the troll gene. Whether it expresses itself is another story. Community-based principles seems one way to clamp it down. But radical changes in the product design is another. Making people less anonymous seems like one very fruitful path.
- cmars232 19y agoReally? Do you have a bayesian filter that can tell trollbait from irony? Some humans have trouble with false positives when it comes to irony...