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Another way out is to simply ignore poor arguments and spend one's scarce time responding to the intelligent ones instead. (Admittedly, this is not always poss

by h34t 19y ago

Another way out is to simply ignore poor arguments and spend one's scarce time responding to the intelligent ones instead. (Admittedly, this is not always possible or desirable.)

pius 19y ago
More and more I'm starting to believe that this is the best approach. It was a wise person who said never to argue with fools because, from a distance, you can't tell who's who.
- hussong 19y ago
  It was also a wise person who said: "Never argue with an idiot, they drag you down to their level and beat you with experience". Seasoned trolling pros are usually very good at this. I think it helps a lot to look at their underlying motivation and to crank up the bullshit detector.
ArcticCelt 19y ago
Another way to not lose your time is to stop posting in troll infested comunities; I don't post on Digg anymore for that and I am now slowly fading out of Reddit for the same reason. The problem on those sites is that their is not only poor comments but also tons of users who upmod them.
- apathy 19y ago
  The problem on those sites is that their is not only poor comments This is a legitimate problem, and ironically it is a symptom that a news concentrator is becoming a victim of its own success. As the signal-to-noise ratio attracts a progressively larger crowd, the types of information that are viewed as 'signal' broaden to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It's similar to hiring in a small company -- but at least in that situation you have control over the purse strings. (Even the trolls get dumber as time goes by and a site grows more popular.) Thus the comments on an arbitrary story suffer, and it requires more work to pick through them. However, if you 'listen' to subcommunities (eg. economics, programming, math on reddit) you find that (unsurprisingly) the baseline rises again. If you have no interest in those subsets, however, you're kind of out of luck. (But if you're here you already knew that) You could probably model this as a logistic process, provided that you account for renormalizations (such as the literal renormalization that took place on reddit recently). but also tons of users who upmod them. This part (or at least its independent, non-interaction effect) is irrelevant; if you focus solely on people who have strong and demonstrated critical thinking skills, you can learn a great deal, and also gain a different perspective. Their input is much more harmful when it comes to filtering in or out the news to be concentrated. Most of the interesting threads in which I have participated eventually lost the interest of the masses because they had descended into minutiae. But that's where the interesting bits lay, so that's where they went. Ignore the riffraff. Lord knows they'll usually ignore you if you're presenting anything challenging. Even in a swamp like Slashdot, there is occasionally a perspective-changing comment that is worth reading. If you want to expose yourself to a wide variety of opinions, you have to be willing to do a bit of work yourself, and determine which ones hold merit. It's a two-way street, in many respects, and your priorities (in addition to your time pressures) will determine how far you are willing to take it. It appears to me that the 'social news' sites on the Web are simply recapitulating the arc of the special-interest BBS nodes and Usenet cliques of years past. Everything old is new again.

by h34t 19y ago

Another way out is to simply ignore poor arguments and spend one's scarce time responding to the intelligent ones instead. (Admittedly, this is not always possible or desirable.)

pius 19y ago

More and more I'm starting to believe that this is the best approach. It was a wise person who said never to argue with fools because, from a distance, you can't tell who's who.

hussong 19y ago
It was also a wise person who said: "Never argue with an idiot, they drag you down to their level and beat you with experience". Seasoned trolling pros are usually very good at this. I think it helps a lot to look at their underlying motivation and to crank up the bullshit detector.

ArcticCelt 19y ago

Another way to not lose your time is to stop posting in troll infested comunities; I don't post on Digg anymore for that and I am now slowly fading out of Reddit for the same reason. The problem on those sites is that their is not only poor comments but also tons of users who upmod them.

apathy 19y ago
The problem on those sites is that their is not only poor comments This is a legitimate problem, and ironically it is a symptom that a news concentrator is becoming a victim of its own success. As the signal-to-noise ratio attracts a progressively larger crowd, the types of information that are viewed as 'signal' broaden to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It's similar to hiring in a small company -- but at least in that situation you have control over the purse strings. (Even the trolls get dumber as time goes by and a site grows more popular.) Thus the comments on an arbitrary story suffer, and it requires more work to pick through them. However, if you 'listen' to subcommunities (eg. economics, programming, math on reddit) you find that (unsurprisingly) the baseline rises again. If you have no interest in those subsets, however, you're kind of out of luck. (But if you're here you already knew that) You could probably model this as a logistic process, provided that you account for renormalizations (such as the literal renormalization that took place on reddit recently). but also tons of users who upmod them. This part (or at least its independent, non-interaction effect) is irrelevant; if you focus solely on people who have strong and demonstrated critical thinking skills, you can learn a great deal, and also gain a different perspective. Their input is much more harmful when it comes to filtering in or out the news to be concentrated. Most of the interesting threads in which I have participated eventually lost the interest of the masses because they had descended into minutiae. But that's where the interesting bits lay, so that's where they went. Ignore the riffraff. Lord knows they'll usually ignore you if you're presenting anything challenging. Even in a swamp like Slashdot, there is occasionally a perspective-changing comment that is worth reading. If you want to expose yourself to a wide variety of opinions, you have to be willing to do a bit of work yourself, and determine which ones hold merit. It's a two-way street, in many respects, and your priorities (in addition to your time pressures) will determine how far you are willing to take it. It appears to me that the 'social news' sites on the Web are simply recapitulating the arc of the special-interest BBS nodes and Usenet cliques of years past. Everything old is new again.