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I appreciate a lot of what you're saying about engaging but the success of trolling often lies in taking up your attention at the expense of other things > By

I appreciate a lot of what you're saying about engaging but the success of trolling often lies in taking up your attention at the expense of other things > By defeating the argument instead of the person. When literally every thread in HN about GDPR/FB has a top-3 comment asking "What about Obama?" how does continuing to defeat that point actually discourage or defeat trolling? The question has been asked and answered, but that doesn't stop people, troll and genuine, from continuing to ask it ad nauseam. At what point does 'defeat the argument' mean we have to entertain conversations about global warming potentially being a hoax, or Obama's birth certificate being fake, or any other number of obviously political and mostly bad-faith because 1 out of 100 commenters have 'genuine' interest in 'conversation' about it?

Natsu 9y ago
You always have to defeat the argument or people will see it succeed and be convinced of the opposite because they've never seen any good rebuttals. There are something like 9 lurkers for every poster and sometimes you're posting for them too. You'll never stop trolling or spam whatever you do, anyhow. For global warming, you can give a simple elevator pitch version about how we have data on a global rise in temperatures and while yes, it was really warm long ago, it's still bad for the people here now. For Obama, well, what does it even matter at this point? I don't think anyone disputes his mother being a citizen so it's pretty much whatever at this point. Regarding Facebook, well, there is a valid point that breaking the Facebook ToS probably isn't the thing we should be the most upset about, and we really do have to deal with the thousands of other companies who compiled massive databases of info whether or not they happened to break the Facebook ToS. Then point out that, yes, privacy advocates have long been against Facebook hoovering everyone's data, including when Obama was president and people are freaked out now because 'privacy violation' didn't mean much to them before but after CA, it's starting to click.

Natsu 9y ago

You always have to defeat the argument or people will see it succeed and be convinced of the opposite because they've never seen any good rebuttals. There are something like 9 lurkers for every poster and sometimes you're posting for them too. You'll never stop trolling or spam whatever you do, anyhow. For global warming, you can give a simple elevator pitch version about how we have data on a global rise in temperatures and while yes, it was really warm long ago, it's still bad for the people here now. For Obama, well, what does it even matter at this point? I don't think anyone disputes his mother being a citizen so it's pretty much whatever at this point. Regarding Facebook, well, there is a valid point that breaking the Facebook ToS probably isn't the thing we should be the most upset about, and we really do have to deal with the thousands of other companies who compiled massive databases of info whether or not they happened to break the Facebook ToS. Then point out that, yes, privacy advocates have long been against Facebook hoovering everyone's data, including when Obama was president and people are freaked out now because 'privacy violation' didn't mean much to them before but after CA, it's starting to click.