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Stop responding to it. No seriously, just stop. This isn't a "complex problem that needs nuanced technical and legislative solutions". Back in the old day, th

Stop responding to it. No seriously, just stop. This isn't a "complex problem that needs nuanced technical and legislative solutions". Back in the old day, there was this saying. "Do not feed the trolls". Sadly, we've forgotten that. Our current approach is, "create rigorous 30 minute point by point take down videos to defeat their point of view". Our urge to debate and correct people who are wrong just fuels them making more content. A troll needs reactions to survive. Just downvote and move along.

Jaygles 7y ago
I think its a fallacy at this point to assume the people pushing toxic or objectively wrong viewpoints are trolls. If it ever was 100% trolls, that time has passed and their target audience is expanding their work in earnest. We now have people who 100% believe objectively wrong things and have an obsession to spread their belief as fact. Edit: If there is a solution to this issue, it will depend on the ratio of these people who are willing to change their mind. A real solution might involve a procedure to move people from the more stubborn camp to a more open minded camp.
- crmrc114 7y ago
  When someone on the street corner tells you the world is ending you ignore them. You dont need a complex technical or social solution. When someone tells me that xyz plant oil cures cancer or the earth is flat... I ignore them. If I want to be a troll I may play along or challenge them if its fun. That's the internet. There have always been nutters- they just found other nutters to talk with and you get a loud feedback loop. You can happily mute them still.
  - manish_gill 7y ago
    The problem is when people with such beliefs acquire position of power or influence, which sadly has already happened.
  - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
    What happens when your child, sibling, friend, parent, or lover is saying those things that they got from the internet?
  - Jaygles 7y ago
    I don't think ignoring the nutters is viable. Enough people are believing anti-vax lies to start bringing back deadly disease which affect more than just themselves. Enough people are believing climate change propaganda which is slowly harming the habitability of our planet for our human race. What was once contained on the internet is leaking out onto the streets and is already affecting you and I in many ways.
    - pnw_hazor 7y ago
      Propaganda has always been there. During the Golden Age of broadcast TV and Radio (pre-internet), the big networks broadcasted plenty of unchallenged lies. The difference now is that laymen can fact check the content put out by the big players. But the price for this is that every troll or nutter has access to the some of the same tools to spread their own lunacy. I far prefer the current situation over the previous. While it may have felt more comfortable when people believed that news readers were telling the truth or reporting truth, it never was that way.
      - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
        Trolls (either human or bots) are way more dangerous that TV propaganda because the act as legitimate actors in the public discourse. It gives them the ability to hide between other people and manipulate the conversation.
    - claytongulick 7y ago
      It's interesting that you mention climate change in this, I agree that it's ground zero for demonstrating the phenomenon of expressing things as objective truth, or fact, that are much more complex than a simple binary.
  - slg 7y ago
    >When someone tells me that xyz plant oil cures cancer... I ignore them. What happens when you see that same person talking to a cancer patient trying to sell them plant oil?
  - jandrese 7y ago
    When you ignore them you tacitly endorse their position. Their propaganda is being broadcast uncontested, there will be people who believe it. Those people will spread it to other people. Pretty soon whooping cough is back and people are dying. The truth can't advocate for itself.
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    'The world as we know it is ending and people like crmrc114 are to blame. There s/he goes right now, messing up the world as we know it!. You know what to do people.' Added as we know it because it's actually quite easy to persuade people that what they like about the world is under dire threat, as opposed to the objective existence of the planet or life thereon. People's individual worlds tend to be quite small and it's easy and socially/politically profitable to market to them with threats rather than inducements to expansion with all the unpredictability that entails. Now, imagine that you've been identified to or by an angry group as the cause of their dissatisfaction. This is a very different dynamic from 'someone on a street corner' that you can usually safely ignore, and against whom you probably feel you could defend yourself if necessary. I don't think you'd be so dismissive of nutters in groups if you were negatively impacted.
- tomatotomato37 7y ago
  >We now have people who 100% believe objectively wrong things and have an obsession to spread their belief as fact. That's not remotely a new thing. Ever since bits could be sent over the wire we've had Dale Gribbles trying to spread their weirdass conspiracies using the web. Only difference is that back then it existed in the form of homemade webpages with remarkably bad color theory rather than the poorly punctuated social media posts of today.
  - meheleventyone 7y ago
    I think the difference is that it’s not fringe obsessives but rather everyday people spreading bad info. Stuff like QAnon, white nationalism, anti-vax, GamerGate and so on might be mostly started and kept well alive by fringe obsessives but plenty of normal people are sharing their memes, lies and content in an uncritical manner in a way that’s very different to personal websites. Social networks have made it much easier for these lies to be spread and repeated whitewashing their true origins and becoming accepted.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  > We now have people who 100% believe objectively wrong things and have an obsession to spread their belief as fact. There's usually enough truth behind every lie - enough to make it compelling enough to believe in. I'm sorry but I don't think it's as obvious as you're making it out to be. We all probably believe something that's objectively wrong. The truth is really in the middle, but all I see is people going further towards fringe opinions.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  I think it's worth expanding your definitions, eg trolls: people who say absurd or mean things for lulz fools: people who truly believe absurd or mean things because they are naive or gullible scammers: people who say absurd or mean things for profit, and may present as fools or absurdist trolls when challenged
roynasser 7y ago
This!!! There was even a "emoji" of beating a troll back in the days o ubb and vbb
iso1631 7y ago
We found a lot of lies during the UK election last month. Not difference in opinions, not beliefs about whay may or will happen, easily proven lies, posted across community forums, copied and pasted to other ones, and repeated in an increasing cresendo People then believe those lies, they repeat them, and even if they don't those lies sink into their subconcious and change their behavior, not necessarily today or tomorrow, but for the next 30 years Ignoring them doesn't fix the problem.
- tengbretson 7y ago
  You might find that the people you see posting and repeating these lies see the things that you post and repeat as lies.
  - organsnyder 7y ago
    And one of the sides has to be right. Sometimes the facts are difficult to ascertain, but so many of the lies spread via social media are easily disproved by consulting primary sources.
    - bilbo0s 7y ago
      >And one of the sides has to be right Not necessarily. In the US one of our presidents taught us a long time ago that "both may be" wrong, and "one must be" wrong.
    - DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
      Perhaps the following is obvious, but other possibilities may exist: - both sides are wrong - the participants are unwittingly talking past each each other Etc.
    - JackFr 7y ago
      But the thing is, while facts are objectively true or false, a policy choice can't be objectively right. What you often see is, policy masquerading as facts. "If you accept X then we need to do Y." "I don't think we should do Y" "Then you reject facts." Something everyone seems to have forgotten is that intelligent, well-informed, people of good will can look at the same facts and come up with different policy prescriptions.
rayuela 7y ago
This is like saying "Just ignore the problem until it goes away," which is cute, but very naive. This is a systematic problem with huge economic incentives pushing things to the extreme. There is massive funding from state and political institutions amplifying and promoting extreme political views. This is come a long way from some lonely dweeb in his basement just looking to get a rise out of someone online.
- naringas 7y ago
  hmm, I think that in this particular case ignoring it will make it go away.. because in the end, the problem is that people pay attention to it. suppose nobody paid attention to such content in the first place, would it really be a problem in that case? I think the tricky part is that if I ignore it, but no one else does, the problem is still there.
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    Suppose cancer didn't have any negative effects, then getting cancer wouldn't be a big deal.
fredley 7y ago
Part of the problem is that social platforms online are built around heavily optimising for engagement. Content that gets engagement must be better, so it gets promoted more heavily, and algorithms show you personally the content it thinks you're most likely to react to. You can't leave because it's messily wrapped up with your social connections to your friends. Until this system dies, we won't solve this problem. It's not good enough to instruct people to stop feeding the trolls: there are huge troll-feeding dopamine farms feeding and nurturing trolls by the millions. Until we shut them down the situation will continue to get worse.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  You don't have to leave, although I think most people overestimate how much it would hurt their social connections if they did. You just have to refuse to engage with toxic content when you see it, the same way you avoid debating with an obnoxious friend. (Newer social media platforms, unsurprisingly, are designed to make this easier; it's much easier to avoid dumb arguments on Instagram or Tiktok than Facebook or Twitter.)
  - fredley 7y ago
    It's you against a whole bunch of bright, motivated, and very smart people trying to keep you commenting, clicking, and getting involved. It's not that easy.
loopz 7y ago
What's new is the political Echochambers. Stop feeding partisan BS. You are not Left nor Right!
- stronglikedan 7y ago
  Even those have been around on the internet since the dawn of the internet.
  - claytongulick 7y ago
    And the Roman empire.
asjw 7y ago
When you stop responding, AKA reacting, you are not solving the problem, you are making it worse. In fact I would say that "don't feed the troll" is the root cause of the huge spike in trolling that we have now. Do not feed the troll meant, from what I understood back then, kill it, not let it grow somewhere else where it's protected.
- jandrese 7y ago
  Exactly. "Don't feed the troll" means report it to the moderator so they can ban them. Letting trolls spew their message unopposed is how you lose your community.
fzeroracer 7y ago
Stop responding is a fools argument. The game has changed a lot since the days of your average internet trolls because the line between internet and reality has become increasingly blurred. For example, I don't use Facebook. But my parents do. I've had to talk with them on more than one occasion because they would get caught reading objectively wrong things spread on Facebook by bots. Thankfully my parents trust me enough that I can be an authority on those sorts of things, but it's not something I can simply ignore. If I were to let it fester, eventually it could turn into things like 'vaccines contain brainwashing bleach' or 'the government wants to take away your spleen' levels of nonsense. At a certain point it's a good idea to stop platforming people like anti-vaxxers but it's also irresponsible to say it's possible to just ignore it.
knowuh 7y ago
'responding to it' is engagement, and there is a financial incentive for that. So the algos are boosting controversy, to boost engagement, to boost financials.
jfengel 7y ago
Not feeding the trolls is good advice for one's personal emotional health, but it has never made the trolls go away. There's too much infrastructure supporting them: they know what works, and they broadcast to everybody. It only takes one response to give them the burst of dopamine they're looking for. Responding makes it worse for you. It gives them a second chance aggravate you, this time with more precision. Downvote and move along is excellent advice -- especially if you're on a platform that helps you filter them out in the future. But don't fool yourself into believing that they'll go away, or that people aren't listening to their misinformation and incorporating it into their belief system -- even if they know it's false.
- mmhsieh 7y ago
  yes, not feeding the trolls is like "don't respond to spam." doesn't really solve either.
- godshatter 7y ago
  I'm only responsible for me. These people won't change, no matter how eloquently I phrase my fact-filled take-down of their arguments. I'll sometimes argue just for the audience, but I can't fix everyone that believes something (I think is) wrong. It's not my place, anyway. People are slowly becoming more "street-wise" on the internet. This is just one of those traps people can only avoid after they've learned their lesson first-hand.
cushychicken 7y ago
Completely off topic, but I love your HN handle!
Animats 7y ago
"Stop responding to it." Then they win elections.
CM30 7y ago
I'd agree in some cases, and disagree in others. In terms of things like 'fake news' and media outlets peddling absolute lies, ignoring it altogether may not be the wisest move. Might in those cases be better to calmly deconstruct the lies and prove the stories are wrong. In terms of things like personal attacks, political toxicity on Twitter, etc? Ignoring the trolls is 100% the best thing to do. The folks that send threats and mock others online want a reaction, and the more reactions they'll get, the more the person reacting will get targeted by even more of them.
ryandvm 7y ago
Absolutely. I'm afraid to admit how long it took me to figure out that you shouldn't argue with people that aren't willing to change their mind.
epx 7y ago
+1. These days, if someone tries to steer me into some sort of polarized political discussion, I give my hourly rate and ask to be paid upfront.
cjslep 7y ago
Some family members that once said "don't believe what you read on the internet" and resistent to the early internet are now some of the biggest sharers of hyperpartisan alarmism online.
kody 7y ago
"Don't feed the trolls" has been my strategy for as long as I've been on the web, but what disconcerts me the most these days is the doxing and death threats. A reporter can simply retweet a news article and instantly be flooded with death threats and see their address posted to the web. There's no way I could tell that person "don't feed the trolls". That's a real problem with real life consequences, and I have no clue how you could begin to solve it, aside from total anonymity.
anigbrowl 7y ago
Back in the old day, there was this saying. "Do not feed the trolls". Sadly, we've forgotten that. It has never worked. Put yourself in the position of someone who is being maliciously harassed by trolls and getting no help from anyone else. It's like telling a weak kid that is being bullied to just ignore it; the reality is that bullies are determined and tend to escalate rather than abandon their aggressive behavior. At best they will move on to picking on some other weaker person.
watwut 7y ago
Do not feed the trolls made Kathy Sierra go out of Internet. It blames victims for daring not to be silent. It is like telling bullied kid to "avoid attackers" or "not be shy" or "do what they want". Ultimately, it rewards trolling behavior.

Jaygles 7y ago

I think its a fallacy at this point to assume the people pushing toxic or objectively wrong viewpoints are trolls. If it ever was 100% trolls, that time has passed and their target audience is expanding their work in earnest. We now have people who 100% believe objectively wrong things and have an obsession to spread their belief as fact. Edit: If there is a solution to this issue, it will depend on the ratio of these people who are willing to change their mind. A real solution might involve a procedure to move people from the more stubborn camp to a more open minded camp.

crmrc114 7y ago
When someone on the street corner tells you the world is ending you ignore them. You dont need a complex technical or social solution. When someone tells me that xyz plant oil cures cancer or the earth is flat... I ignore them. If I want to be a troll I may play along or challenge them if its fun. That's the internet. There have always been nutters- they just found other nutters to talk with and you get a loud feedback loop. You can happily mute them still.
- manish_gill 7y ago
  The problem is when people with such beliefs acquire position of power or influence, which sadly has already happened.
- SolaceQuantum 7y ago
  What happens when your child, sibling, friend, parent, or lover is saying those things that they got from the internet?
- Jaygles 7y ago
  I don't think ignoring the nutters is viable. Enough people are believing anti-vax lies to start bringing back deadly disease which affect more than just themselves. Enough people are believing climate change propaganda which is slowly harming the habitability of our planet for our human race. What was once contained on the internet is leaking out onto the streets and is already affecting you and I in many ways.
  - pnw_hazor 7y ago
    Propaganda has always been there. During the Golden Age of broadcast TV and Radio (pre-internet), the big networks broadcasted plenty of unchallenged lies. The difference now is that laymen can fact check the content put out by the big players. But the price for this is that every troll or nutter has access to the some of the same tools to spread their own lunacy. I far prefer the current situation over the previous. While it may have felt more comfortable when people believed that news readers were telling the truth or reporting truth, it never was that way.
    - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
      Trolls (either human or bots) are way more dangerous that TV propaganda because the act as legitimate actors in the public discourse. It gives them the ability to hide between other people and manipulate the conversation.
  - claytongulick 7y ago
    It's interesting that you mention climate change in this, I agree that it's ground zero for demonstrating the phenomenon of expressing things as objective truth, or fact, that are much more complex than a simple binary.
- slg 7y ago
  >When someone tells me that xyz plant oil cures cancer... I ignore them. What happens when you see that same person talking to a cancer patient trying to sell them plant oil?
- jandrese 7y ago
  When you ignore them you tacitly endorse their position. Their propaganda is being broadcast uncontested, there will be people who believe it. Those people will spread it to other people. Pretty soon whooping cough is back and people are dying. The truth can't advocate for itself.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  'The world as we know it is ending and people like crmrc114 are to blame. There s/he goes right now, messing up the world as we know it!. You know what to do people.' Added as we know it because it's actually quite easy to persuade people that what they like about the world is under dire threat, as opposed to the objective existence of the planet or life thereon. People's individual worlds tend to be quite small and it's easy and socially/politically profitable to market to them with threats rather than inducements to expansion with all the unpredictability that entails. Now, imagine that you've been identified to or by an angry group as the cause of their dissatisfaction. This is a very different dynamic from 'someone on a street corner' that you can usually safely ignore, and against whom you probably feel you could defend yourself if necessary. I don't think you'd be so dismissive of nutters in groups if you were negatively impacted.
tomatotomato37 7y ago
>We now have people who 100% believe objectively wrong things and have an obsession to spread their belief as fact. That's not remotely a new thing. Ever since bits could be sent over the wire we've had Dale Gribbles trying to spread their weirdass conspiracies using the web. Only difference is that back then it existed in the form of homemade webpages with remarkably bad color theory rather than the poorly punctuated social media posts of today.
- meheleventyone 7y ago
  I think the difference is that it’s not fringe obsessives but rather everyday people spreading bad info. Stuff like QAnon, white nationalism, anti-vax, GamerGate and so on might be mostly started and kept well alive by fringe obsessives but plenty of normal people are sharing their memes, lies and content in an uncritical manner in a way that’s very different to personal websites. Social networks have made it much easier for these lies to be spread and repeated whitewashing their true origins and becoming accepted.
cameronbrown 7y ago
> We now have people who 100% believe objectively wrong things and have an obsession to spread their belief as fact. There's usually enough truth behind every lie - enough to make it compelling enough to believe in. I'm sorry but I don't think it's as obvious as you're making it out to be. We all probably believe something that's objectively wrong. The truth is really in the middle, but all I see is people going further towards fringe opinions.
anigbrowl 7y ago
I think it's worth expanding your definitions, eg trolls: people who say absurd or mean things for lulz fools: people who truly believe absurd or mean things because they are naive or gullible scammers: people who say absurd or mean things for profit, and may present as fools or absurdist trolls when challenged

roynasser 7y ago

This!!! There was even a "emoji" of beating a troll back in the days o ubb and vbb

iso1631 7y ago

We found a lot of lies during the UK election last month. Not difference in opinions, not beliefs about whay may or will happen, easily proven lies, posted across community forums, copied and pasted to other ones, and repeated in an increasing cresendo People then believe those lies, they repeat them, and even if they don't those lies sink into their subconcious and change their behavior, not necessarily today or tomorrow, but for the next 30 years Ignoring them doesn't fix the problem.

tengbretson 7y ago
You might find that the people you see posting and repeating these lies see the things that you post and repeat as lies.
- organsnyder 7y ago
  And one of the sides has to be right. Sometimes the facts are difficult to ascertain, but so many of the lies spread via social media are easily disproved by consulting primary sources.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    >And one of the sides has to be right Not necessarily. In the US one of our presidents taught us a long time ago that "both may be" wrong, and "one must be" wrong.
  - DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
    Perhaps the following is obvious, but other possibilities may exist: - both sides are wrong - the participants are unwittingly talking past each each other Etc.
  - JackFr 7y ago
    But the thing is, while facts are objectively true or false, a policy choice can't be objectively right. What you often see is, policy masquerading as facts. "If you accept X then we need to do Y." "I don't think we should do Y" "Then you reject facts." Something everyone seems to have forgotten is that intelligent, well-informed, people of good will can look at the same facts and come up with different policy prescriptions.

rayuela 7y ago

This is like saying "Just ignore the problem until it goes away," which is cute, but very naive. This is a systematic problem with huge economic incentives pushing things to the extreme. There is massive funding from state and political institutions amplifying and promoting extreme political views. This is come a long way from some lonely dweeb in his basement just looking to get a rise out of someone online.

naringas 7y ago
hmm, I think that in this particular case ignoring it will make it go away.. because in the end, the problem is that people pay attention to it. suppose nobody paid attention to such content in the first place, would it really be a problem in that case? I think the tricky part is that if I ignore it, but no one else does, the problem is still there.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  Suppose cancer didn't have any negative effects, then getting cancer wouldn't be a big deal.

fredley 7y ago

Part of the problem is that social platforms online are built around heavily optimising for engagement. Content that gets engagement must be better, so it gets promoted more heavily, and algorithms show you personally the content it thinks you're most likely to react to. You can't leave because it's messily wrapped up with your social connections to your friends. Until this system dies, we won't solve this problem. It's not good enough to instruct people to stop feeding the trolls: there are huge troll-feeding dopamine farms feeding and nurturing trolls by the millions. Until we shut them down the situation will continue to get worse.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
You don't have to leave, although I think most people overestimate how much it would hurt their social connections if they did. You just have to refuse to engage with toxic content when you see it, the same way you avoid debating with an obnoxious friend. (Newer social media platforms, unsurprisingly, are designed to make this easier; it's much easier to avoid dumb arguments on Instagram or Tiktok than Facebook or Twitter.)
- fredley 7y ago
  It's you against a whole bunch of bright, motivated, and very smart people trying to keep you commenting, clicking, and getting involved. It's not that easy.

loopz 7y ago

What's new is the political Echochambers. Stop feeding partisan BS. You are not Left nor Right!

stronglikedan 7y ago
Even those have been around on the internet since the dawn of the internet.
- claytongulick 7y ago
  And the Roman empire.

asjw 7y ago

When you stop responding, AKA reacting, you are not solving the problem, you are making it worse. In fact I would say that "don't feed the troll" is the root cause of the huge spike in trolling that we have now. Do not feed the troll meant, from what I understood back then, kill it, not let it grow somewhere else where it's protected.

jandrese 7y ago
Exactly. "Don't feed the troll" means report it to the moderator so they can ban them. Letting trolls spew their message unopposed is how you lose your community.

fzeroracer 7y ago

Stop responding is a fools argument. The game has changed a lot since the days of your average internet trolls because the line between internet and reality has become increasingly blurred. For example, I don't use Facebook. But my parents do. I've had to talk with them on more than one occasion because they would get caught reading objectively wrong things spread on Facebook by bots. Thankfully my parents trust me enough that I can be an authority on those sorts of things, but it's not something I can simply ignore. If I were to let it fester, eventually it could turn into things like 'vaccines contain brainwashing bleach' or 'the government wants to take away your spleen' levels of nonsense. At a certain point it's a good idea to stop platforming people like anti-vaxxers but it's also irresponsible to say it's possible to just ignore it.

knowuh 7y ago

'responding to it' is engagement, and there is a financial incentive for that. So the algos are boosting controversy, to boost engagement, to boost financials.

jfengel 7y ago

Not feeding the trolls is good advice for one's personal emotional health, but it has never made the trolls go away. There's too much infrastructure supporting them: they know what works, and they broadcast to everybody. It only takes one response to give them the burst of dopamine they're looking for. Responding makes it worse for you. It gives them a second chance aggravate you, this time with more precision. Downvote and move along is excellent advice -- especially if you're on a platform that helps you filter them out in the future. But don't fool yourself into believing that they'll go away, or that people aren't listening to their misinformation and incorporating it into their belief system -- even if they know it's false.

mmhsieh 7y ago
yes, not feeding the trolls is like "don't respond to spam." doesn't really solve either.
godshatter 7y ago
I'm only responsible for me. These people won't change, no matter how eloquently I phrase my fact-filled take-down of their arguments. I'll sometimes argue just for the audience, but I can't fix everyone that believes something (I think is) wrong. It's not my place, anyway. People are slowly becoming more "street-wise" on the internet. This is just one of those traps people can only avoid after they've learned their lesson first-hand.

cushychicken 7y ago

Completely off topic, but I love your HN handle!

Animats 7y ago

"Stop responding to it." Then they win elections.

CM30 7y ago

I'd agree in some cases, and disagree in others. In terms of things like 'fake news' and media outlets peddling absolute lies, ignoring it altogether may not be the wisest move. Might in those cases be better to calmly deconstruct the lies and prove the stories are wrong. In terms of things like personal attacks, political toxicity on Twitter, etc? Ignoring the trolls is 100% the best thing to do. The folks that send threats and mock others online want a reaction, and the more reactions they'll get, the more the person reacting will get targeted by even more of them.

ryandvm 7y ago

Absolutely. I'm afraid to admit how long it took me to figure out that you shouldn't argue with people that aren't willing to change their mind.

epx 7y ago

+1. These days, if someone tries to steer me into some sort of polarized political discussion, I give my hourly rate and ask to be paid upfront.

cjslep 7y ago

Some family members that once said "don't believe what you read on the internet" and resistent to the early internet are now some of the biggest sharers of hyperpartisan alarmism online.

kody 7y ago

"Don't feed the trolls" has been my strategy for as long as I've been on the web, but what disconcerts me the most these days is the doxing and death threats. A reporter can simply retweet a news article and instantly be flooded with death threats and see their address posted to the web. There's no way I could tell that person "don't feed the trolls". That's a real problem with real life consequences, and I have no clue how you could begin to solve it, aside from total anonymity.

anigbrowl 7y ago

Back in the old day, there was this saying. "Do not feed the trolls". Sadly, we've forgotten that. It has never worked. Put yourself in the position of someone who is being maliciously harassed by trolls and getting no help from anyone else. It's like telling a weak kid that is being bullied to just ignore it; the reality is that bullies are determined and tend to escalate rather than abandon their aggressive behavior. At best they will move on to picking on some other weaker person.

watwut 7y ago

Do not feed the trolls made Kathy Sierra go out of Internet. It blames victims for daring not to be silent. It is like telling bullied kid to "avoid attackers" or "not be shy" or "do what they want". Ultimately, it rewards trolling behavior.