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The majority of people who say "don't feed the trolls" have never been the focus of a trolling campaign, I've found. It is easy to claim this when you aren't un

The majority of people who say "don't feed the trolls" have never been the focus of a trolling campaign, I've found. It is easy to claim this when you aren't under constant violent harassment and scrutiny. It is not fair to expect everyone else to have a "battle-hardened" stoicism when you've probably never experienced such a life. I've never experienced such harassment myself and used to sing the "ignore" mantra too, until I tried to imagine myself in the shoes of those who receive frequent harassment, and I'm not sure I would be able to ignore at the same level they are expected to. Also, I'm not sure you are arguing whether a cause of the issue is identity being coupled to your internet presence, but I'm not sure we can go back to the internet of the early 2000's or late 90's, so we need to deal with the world as it exists now instead of thinking appeal to tradition will solve issues we have today.

ocschwar 10y ago
"Don't feed the trolls" was a useful thing to say back when the word meant something far more specific than just "someone behaving badly on the Internet."
- bhntr3 10y ago
  Yeah, the meaning has shifted. It used to be that if people knew you were trolling, you weren't a good troll. Now a troll is just an asshole on the internet.
  - kazinator 10y ago
    Some of the newbies don't understand that "troll" refers to "trolling" as in "fishing troller": evoking the metaphor of casting a net to collect responses like fish. They imagine "troll" as a metaphor invoking the humanoid creature from Scandinavian folklore, which, in the Three Billy Goats Gruff story, is a nasty, unpleasant, violent creature who wants to eat everyone who crosses his bridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Billy_Goats_Gruff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Billy_Goats_Gruff Hence the asshole angle.
    - mos_basik 10y ago
      Adding to that - all the cool kids these days are saying "baiting" instead of "trolling". The concept (and metaphor) hasn't been lost.
      - WiseWeasel 10y ago
        Trolling is scraping the bottom, stirring the muck up into a net; not quite analogous to luring/baiting, a much more sporting tactic.
        mirimir 10y ago
        No, that's trawling. Trolling is also called longline fishing, with many baited hooks.
        WiseWeasel 10y ago
        Ohhhhh... it should be called trawling then! : P
        kazinator 10y ago
        I suspect that when troll refers to dragging anything, it's just a spelling and regional pronunciation variant on trawl. According to etymonline.com, the etymology of "trawl" is: 1560s, from Dutch tragelen, from Middle Dutch traghelen "to drag," from traghel "dragnet," probably from Latin tragula "dragnet." Related: Trawled; trawling. Now, "troll" verb: late 14c., "to go about, stroll," later (early 15c.) "roll from side to side, trundle," probably from Old French troller, a hunting term, "wander, to go in quest of game without purpose" (Modern French trôler), from a Germanic source (compare Old High German trollen "to walk with short steps"), from Proto-Germanic truzlanan.* It's rather related to "stroll". Nothing in the semantics about fishing. I suspect that "troll" in longline fishing in fact refers to the long line with many hooks being pulled around; i.e. "trawled".
    - pessimizer 10y ago
      You measure the success of a troll by the ratio of the number of characters the troll types to the number of characters typed in response. It wasn't a term describing disagreeing with or threatening people, it described annoying and distracting people. The ultimate troll is a well-timed and placed piece of copypasta, which at ctrl-c ctrl-v is impossible to beat.
Qantourisc 10y ago
I'm confused, are we talking about trolls or harassment ?
- H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
  These terms tend to get conflated, especially in parts of the web where people use their real names.
  - mirimir 10y ago
    Yeah. Total OpSec failure, as I see it. I learned that hard on Usenet.
- H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
  These terms tend to get conflated, especially in parts of the web where people use their real names.
- mirimir 10y ago
  Harassment is arguably a kind of trolling. And trolling is arguably a kind of harassment. But then there's the ideal of free speech.
  - Qantourisc 10y ago
    I always seen it like this: trolling: silly arguments, maybe attacking a person in a thread about their viewpoint (ad hominem) during a thread. While harassment is insulting a person, everywhere regardless of the thread going on, as well as attacks while the person is not participating in a/the discussion.
    - mirimir 10y ago
      Yeah, I get that. But what happens is that threads on one site become trolling topics on other sites. So harassment becomes part of the trolling game.
milesrout 10y ago
1. 'Trolling' is not harassment. You can harass someone by trolling them incessantly, but harassing people is not 'trolling' them. Don't use them as synonyms. 2. They've never been the focus of a harassment campaign because they're not stupid enough to put their personal details out there on the internet and then be surprised that people will use that to harass them. They also don't feed the trolls in the first place. >I've never experienced such harassment myself and used to sing the "ignore" mantra too, until I tried to imagine myself in the shoes of those who receive frequent harassment, and I'm not sure I would be able to ignore at the same level they are expected to. 99.9% of people that complain about being harassed would be well-served by just not using Twitter. Twitter sucks, and has always sucked. It's the epitome of short attention spans and soundbites. Don't use Twitter. >Also, I'm not sure you are arguing whether a cause of the issue is identity being coupled to your internet presence, but I'm not sure we can go back to the internet of the early 2000's or late 90's, so we need to deal with the world as it exists now instead of thinking appeal to tradition will solve issues we have today. Nobody is saying we have to go back to the internet of the late 90s. We just need to understand that there aren't more trolls now than there were then. There are more people in general, and when you are anonymous, they don't have anything to harass you with.
- ksenzee 10y ago
  > 99.9% of people that complain about being harassed would be well-served by just not using Twitter. This is a cop-out. You may not need Twitter for your work, but a lot of us do. If I can't use Twitter, I lose an important way to connect to others in my profession (specifically in open source). And I'm an unimportant software developer. What about women in journalism? What about women in entertainment? They need Twitter, and they need it connected to their real-world identity. You might as well tell them "quit walking on the street, or wear a burka, and you won't get harassed or assaulted." It would be the same cop-out. We have police to keep the streets safe. We need Twitter to be safe too.
  - 5thaccount 10y ago
    > We need Twitter to be safe too. In theory agree keeping things safe seems great, but I struggle with the idea that we can define "safe" in a way that is reasonable and makes sense, and where the punishment is effective and reasonable. The vast majority of times I have seen claims of harassment, the usual process is that someone makes a controversial statement, then realises the group that objects was larger than they imagined as they receive hundreds and thousands objections, some of which are almost certainly awful. I understand how that can feel like harassment when 10,000 people tweet at you, and in 10,000 tweets half a dozen are guaranteed to sound batshit insane and downright scary, but it isn't harassment to be disagreed with, nor to have ideas that you promote subject to scrutiny. SM amplifies what that scrutiny looks like massively, but pure numbers don't constitute harassment. Nor does people watching everything you say and commenting on it. And this is where it gets tough, nor does having people say mean things about you, because mean is just so subjective. Any definition of harassment is really tricky, and a definition of "safe" is even more difficult, and we haven't even got to the punishment part yet. Ultimately, the idea we can stop people disagreeing, and disagreeing passionately enough to border on troubling, is impossible, and what is needed is a something proactive an individual can do to protect themselves. And I have no idea what that is!
Baeocystin 10y ago
Trolls are a completely different thing than criminal harassment, and it is disingenuous to equate the two. The primary danger is that by lumping people with legitimate criminal complaints in with people who are sad because someone said some mean words to them on the internet, you don't make others more concerned about rudeness, you make them less concerned when someone has a real problem.
- pdeuchler 10y ago
  Also worth noting that criminal harassment via the internet is largely a failing of law enforcement, not a failing of the infrastructure of the internet or a sudden arrival of a new species of really mean humans. There are some privacy/free speech issues down this road, but by and large LE have abdicated their responsibilities in this area. And while it's a different discussion all together, I think examining why conflating criminal harassment and "trolling" has become in vogue would teach us a lot about how power is used in the modern age.
  - DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
    > LE have abdicated their responsibilities in this area. On the contrary. One of my side-projects is involved with the running an Internet-to-PSTN wake-up-call service. The service is free-to-use in the US (because domestic calling is so cheap) which also means it gets used by criminal-harassers who send wake-up calls at 4am to their targets (we do aggressively rate-limit which helps mitigate these issues). We are frequently contacted by local police departments across the country (we don't spoof our Caller ID) seeking information about who made the call (roughly 25% of the time we get a subpoena or court order) and almost always we see the call request came from an IP address hiding behind a simple PHP web proxy script or a Tor node. While my story is an anecdote it does demonstrate that it is very easy to hide your identity online for quick hit-and-run harrassment - it's not that LE have abdicated - it's that they've done all they can do - because what can you do with an IP address allocated to Egypt? While the issue I've described is a societal problem, it does have a technical solution: if the phone numbering system were redesigned so they worked more like email addresses then people could change their phone numbers or use disposable numbers and aliases which would put an immediate end to unwanted calls... but that's not going to happen.
niggerdeath 10y ago
Yeah buddy we should lock up anyone who makes fun of your wise blogs.
drenvuk 10y ago
Your first sentence points out the problem. Those people allowed themselves to become the focus of a trolling campaign by putting themselves out there in the first place. It would be fairly easy to avoid that if your identity online was just a name not linked to anything else. If you put your life online it's expected that someone who has nothing better to do and is hidden behind anonymity will make it harder for you. I prefer it this way to be honest. So many people want more rules to protect them. We have enough, leave the internet alone please. Any rule that someone comes up with is most likely going to be a power grab and make it more difficult for those that know what they're doing.
bandushrew 10y ago
I have multiple internet presence's. My "real" presence is empty of anything except professional presence. LinkedIn, github etc etc. My "real" presence never engages, never debates and is effectively not there except when it engages with the real world via resumes etc. My actual presence is scattered across the internet in multiple pseudonymous social networks and eagerly discusses topics I am passionate about. It occasionally attracts harassment etc, but I dont care cause they cannot reach out into my real life and actually harm me.
- paulryanrogers 10y ago
  I've tried this approach too. Though it's challenging to maintain the constant vigilance that's sometimes required. I doubt it's a workable solution for most of the people I know.
- jackvalentine 10y ago
  I don't say this to troll you but googling your HN name reveals more than enough to know your real name, where you live and start linking it all to other non-programming hobbies (piano!).
  - mirimir 10y ago
    Yes, that can be problematic. But hey, maybe it's misdirection ;) Who do you think Mirimir is?
    - jackvalentine 10y ago
      I'm sorry but I'm not here to check your opsec for you.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - SturgeonsLaw 10y ago
      Probably Maximillian Holm. Am I close?
mirimir 10y ago
Well, one can dox "violent harassers".
aaron695 10y ago
This is junk. 'Don't feed the trolls' has nothing to do with harassment, it's about the quality of forums and user content. But to be honest not sure if you are being meta? This is a bit of a troll statement.
scythe 10y ago
Targeted harassment is only a fraction of all harassment. Some harassment is not easily avoidable, but some of it is easily avoidable.
bobdole1234 10y ago
Most people aren't willing to do the actual act that takes away the meat for trolls: delete and start a new identity without association with the old one. I changed my IRC identity dozens of times when assholes decided they wanted to make me miserable, the solution is to be the person who walks away without looking back. We keep thinking the places we congregate and the identities we put out there are the important parts, when really the important parts are the relationships you migrate when someone makes the current location for discussion untenable. Just pick a new name in a new place, and invite your friends.

ocschwar 10y ago

"Don't feed the trolls" was a useful thing to say back when the word meant something far more specific than just "someone behaving badly on the Internet."

bhntr3 10y ago
Yeah, the meaning has shifted. It used to be that if people knew you were trolling, you weren't a good troll. Now a troll is just an asshole on the internet.
- kazinator 10y ago
  Some of the newbies don't understand that "troll" refers to "trolling" as in "fishing troller": evoking the metaphor of casting a net to collect responses like fish. They imagine "troll" as a metaphor invoking the humanoid creature from Scandinavian folklore, which, in the Three Billy Goats Gruff story, is a nasty, unpleasant, violent creature who wants to eat everyone who crosses his bridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Billy_Goats_Gruff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Billy_Goats_Gruff Hence the asshole angle.
  - mos_basik 10y ago
    Adding to that - all the cool kids these days are saying "baiting" instead of "trolling". The concept (and metaphor) hasn't been lost.
    - WiseWeasel 10y ago
      Trolling is scraping the bottom, stirring the muck up into a net; not quite analogous to luring/baiting, a much more sporting tactic.
      - mirimir 10y ago
        No, that's trawling. Trolling is also called longline fishing, with many baited hooks.
        WiseWeasel 10y ago
        Ohhhhh... it should be called trawling then! : P
        kazinator 10y ago
        I suspect that when troll refers to dragging anything, it's just a spelling and regional pronunciation variant on trawl. According to etymonline.com, the etymology of "trawl" is: 1560s, from Dutch tragelen, from Middle Dutch traghelen "to drag," from traghel "dragnet," probably from Latin tragula "dragnet." Related: Trawled; trawling. Now, "troll" verb: late 14c., "to go about, stroll," later (early 15c.) "roll from side to side, trundle," probably from Old French troller, a hunting term, "wander, to go in quest of game without purpose" (Modern French trôler), from a Germanic source (compare Old High German trollen "to walk with short steps"), from Proto-Germanic truzlanan.* It's rather related to "stroll". Nothing in the semantics about fishing. I suspect that "troll" in longline fishing in fact refers to the long line with many hooks being pulled around; i.e. "trawled".
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    You measure the success of a troll by the ratio of the number of characters the troll types to the number of characters typed in response. It wasn't a term describing disagreeing with or threatening people, it described annoying and distracting people. The ultimate troll is a well-timed and placed piece of copypasta, which at ctrl-c ctrl-v is impossible to beat.

Qantourisc 10y ago

I'm confused, are we talking about trolls or harassment ?

H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
These terms tend to get conflated, especially in parts of the web where people use their real names.
- mirimir 10y ago
  Yeah. Total OpSec failure, as I see it. I learned that hard on Usenet.
H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
These terms tend to get conflated, especially in parts of the web where people use their real names.
mirimir 10y ago
Harassment is arguably a kind of trolling. And trolling is arguably a kind of harassment. But then there's the ideal of free speech.
- Qantourisc 10y ago
  I always seen it like this: trolling: silly arguments, maybe attacking a person in a thread about their viewpoint (ad hominem) during a thread. While harassment is insulting a person, everywhere regardless of the thread going on, as well as attacks while the person is not participating in a/the discussion.
  - mirimir 10y ago
    Yeah, I get that. But what happens is that threads on one site become trolling topics on other sites. So harassment becomes part of the trolling game.

milesrout 10y ago

1. 'Trolling' is not harassment. You can harass someone by trolling them incessantly, but harassing people is not 'trolling' them. Don't use them as synonyms. 2. They've never been the focus of a harassment campaign because they're not stupid enough to put their personal details out there on the internet and then be surprised that people will use that to harass them. They also don't feed the trolls in the first place. >I've never experienced such harassment myself and used to sing the "ignore" mantra too, until I tried to imagine myself in the shoes of those who receive frequent harassment, and I'm not sure I would be able to ignore at the same level they are expected to. 99.9% of people that complain about being harassed would be well-served by just not using Twitter. Twitter sucks, and has always sucked. It's the epitome of short attention spans and soundbites. Don't use Twitter. >Also, I'm not sure you are arguing whether a cause of the issue is identity being coupled to your internet presence, but I'm not sure we can go back to the internet of the early 2000's or late 90's, so we need to deal with the world as it exists now instead of thinking appeal to tradition will solve issues we have today. Nobody is saying we have to go back to the internet of the late 90s. We just need to understand that there aren't more trolls now than there were then. There are more people in general, and when you are anonymous, they don't have anything to harass you with.

ksenzee 10y ago
> 99.9% of people that complain about being harassed would be well-served by just not using Twitter. This is a cop-out. You may not need Twitter for your work, but a lot of us do. If I can't use Twitter, I lose an important way to connect to others in my profession (specifically in open source). And I'm an unimportant software developer. What about women in journalism? What about women in entertainment? They need Twitter, and they need it connected to their real-world identity. You might as well tell them "quit walking on the street, or wear a burka, and you won't get harassed or assaulted." It would be the same cop-out. We have police to keep the streets safe. We need Twitter to be safe too.
- 5thaccount 10y ago
  > We need Twitter to be safe too. In theory agree keeping things safe seems great, but I struggle with the idea that we can define "safe" in a way that is reasonable and makes sense, and where the punishment is effective and reasonable. The vast majority of times I have seen claims of harassment, the usual process is that someone makes a controversial statement, then realises the group that objects was larger than they imagined as they receive hundreds and thousands objections, some of which are almost certainly awful. I understand how that can feel like harassment when 10,000 people tweet at you, and in 10,000 tweets half a dozen are guaranteed to sound batshit insane and downright scary, but it isn't harassment to be disagreed with, nor to have ideas that you promote subject to scrutiny. SM amplifies what that scrutiny looks like massively, but pure numbers don't constitute harassment. Nor does people watching everything you say and commenting on it. And this is where it gets tough, nor does having people say mean things about you, because mean is just so subjective. Any definition of harassment is really tricky, and a definition of "safe" is even more difficult, and we haven't even got to the punishment part yet. Ultimately, the idea we can stop people disagreeing, and disagreeing passionately enough to border on troubling, is impossible, and what is needed is a something proactive an individual can do to protect themselves. And I have no idea what that is!

Baeocystin 10y ago

Trolls are a completely different thing than criminal harassment, and it is disingenuous to equate the two. The primary danger is that by lumping people with legitimate criminal complaints in with people who are sad because someone said some mean words to them on the internet, you don't make others more concerned about rudeness, you make them less concerned when someone has a real problem.

pdeuchler 10y ago
Also worth noting that criminal harassment via the internet is largely a failing of law enforcement, not a failing of the infrastructure of the internet or a sudden arrival of a new species of really mean humans. There are some privacy/free speech issues down this road, but by and large LE have abdicated their responsibilities in this area. And while it's a different discussion all together, I think examining why conflating criminal harassment and "trolling" has become in vogue would teach us a lot about how power is used in the modern age.
- DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
  > LE have abdicated their responsibilities in this area. On the contrary. One of my side-projects is involved with the running an Internet-to-PSTN wake-up-call service. The service is free-to-use in the US (because domestic calling is so cheap) which also means it gets used by criminal-harassers who send wake-up calls at 4am to their targets (we do aggressively rate-limit which helps mitigate these issues). We are frequently contacted by local police departments across the country (we don't spoof our Caller ID) seeking information about who made the call (roughly 25% of the time we get a subpoena or court order) and almost always we see the call request came from an IP address hiding behind a simple PHP web proxy script or a Tor node. While my story is an anecdote it does demonstrate that it is very easy to hide your identity online for quick hit-and-run harrassment - it's not that LE have abdicated - it's that they've done all they can do - because what can you do with an IP address allocated to Egypt? While the issue I've described is a societal problem, it does have a technical solution: if the phone numbering system were redesigned so they worked more like email addresses then people could change their phone numbers or use disposable numbers and aliases which would put an immediate end to unwanted calls... but that's not going to happen.

niggerdeath 10y ago

Yeah buddy we should lock up anyone who makes fun of your wise blogs.

drenvuk 10y ago

Your first sentence points out the problem. Those people allowed themselves to become the focus of a trolling campaign by putting themselves out there in the first place. It would be fairly easy to avoid that if your identity online was just a name not linked to anything else. If you put your life online it's expected that someone who has nothing better to do and is hidden behind anonymity will make it harder for you. I prefer it this way to be honest. So many people want more rules to protect them. We have enough, leave the internet alone please. Any rule that someone comes up with is most likely going to be a power grab and make it more difficult for those that know what they're doing.

bandushrew 10y ago

I have multiple internet presence's. My "real" presence is empty of anything except professional presence. LinkedIn, github etc etc. My "real" presence never engages, never debates and is effectively not there except when it engages with the real world via resumes etc. My actual presence is scattered across the internet in multiple pseudonymous social networks and eagerly discusses topics I am passionate about. It occasionally attracts harassment etc, but I dont care cause they cannot reach out into my real life and actually harm me.

paulryanrogers 10y ago
I've tried this approach too. Though it's challenging to maintain the constant vigilance that's sometimes required. I doubt it's a workable solution for most of the people I know.
jackvalentine 10y ago
I don't say this to troll you but googling your HN name reveals more than enough to know your real name, where you live and start linking it all to other non-programming hobbies (piano!).
- mirimir 10y ago
  Yes, that can be problematic. But hey, maybe it's misdirection ;) Who do you think Mirimir is?
  - jackvalentine 10y ago
    I'm sorry but I'm not here to check your opsec for you.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - SturgeonsLaw 10y ago
    Probably Maximillian Holm. Am I close?

mirimir 10y ago

Well, one can dox "violent harassers".

aaron695 10y ago

This is junk. 'Don't feed the trolls' has nothing to do with harassment, it's about the quality of forums and user content. But to be honest not sure if you are being meta? This is a bit of a troll statement.

scythe 10y ago

Targeted harassment is only a fraction of all harassment. Some harassment is not easily avoidable, but some of it is easily avoidable.

bobdole1234 10y ago

Most people aren't willing to do the actual act that takes away the meat for trolls: delete and start a new identity without association with the old one. I changed my IRC identity dozens of times when assholes decided they wanted to make me miserable, the solution is to be the person who walks away without looking back. We keep thinking the places we congregate and the identities we put out there are the important parts, when really the important parts are the relationships you migrate when someone makes the current location for discussion untenable. Just pick a new name in a new place, and invite your friends.