6 ms·

> They can exist because both of them are going to HAVE to learn how to engage with one another You're assuming good faith from both parties. Harassers and tro

> They can exist because both of them are going to HAVE to learn how to engage with one another You're assuming good faith from both parties. Harassers and trolls don't act in good faith.

aaomidi 6y ago
And now with gpt3 we can create an endlessly creative bots of harassers!
nine_k 6y ago
There is a well-known recipe against trolls: do not feed them. Block and ignore them. If you visit a bathroom, you normally don't bloviate about the kind of crap you had just to flush, you rather avoid the topic; the same applies to trolls. Bring zero attention to them. Trolls' game is all about drawing attention, in the form of ire, offense, and and panic. Deprive them this, and they'll cease to bother you much. This is, of course, easier to do if you are a statue of buddha made of reinforced concrete, but even us living beings can learn and engage in some best practices of communication online.
- nyanpasu64 6y ago
  What happens if the trolls decide to bring explosives to blow up your Buddha statue?
  - nine_k 6y ago
    I think it stretches the metaphor outside its charted range. OTOH using explosives is outright violence, and would likely be illegal by US federal laws.
  - smsm42 6y ago
    We've witnessed hundreds of statues destroyed last year, from Abraham Lincoln to Cervantes. So we know the answer - if it's the right people doing blowing up, nothing happens, you have one statue left and you are forced to apologize for putting it up in the first place.
- paulv 6y ago
  Blocking, muting, or ignoring a handful of people may work. But when you have hundreds or thousands or more people harassing you, blocking them all isn't practical or sufficient. Get enough people mad at you and you'll end up being SWATted or doxxed (or turned in to deepfake porn). At some point the trolls start feeding each other. Next thing you know we end up with another gamergate (which started because some dude was mad at his ex).
  - Grustaf 6y ago
    People can still SWAT you even after they've been banned from Twitter though.
- acdha 6y ago
  This approach only works if they don’t care about you. There’s a couple of decades of history by now showing how this approach fails, ranging from mass harassment (want to spend weeks blocking randos and sock puppets?) to attempts to contact your family and coworkers up to in-person harassment, placing Craigslist ads with your address saying you have violent rape fantasies, and SWATing. This is, of course, unevenly distributed. If you’re a white guy you have to work at it to get the same level of resentment in certain circles that other people start with by being female, brown, gay, etc. GamerGate is well worth learning about as an extreme example of how far it can get beyond the level where blocking works: it started with one person (Eron Gjoni) trying to clinch the “worst ex ever” title by rallying a hate mob against his ex girlfriend with some fake claims, which produced hate spasms for over a year, multiple police investigations, and fed into the 2016 US Presidential election. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    You were doing pretty good right up until you tried to channel GamerGame... that was a huge mistake. I get that you believe the "Official Party Line"(TM), but a lot of people don't, and a lot of us watched this whole thing unfold real-time across The Zoe Post, 4chan, reddit, and every other major venue on which it presented itself. Furthermore, some of us actually know the participants involved in a professional and private capacity. Yes, Gjoni "did a bad thing" by posting all the duplicitous shitty things Quinn did... but therein lies the rub. If you don't want to be called out for being a cheater who fucks game journalists for good reviews... then don't cheat on your boyfriend and fuck game journalists for reviews. It really is that goddamn simple. What GamerGate really was, was that gamers - the naive idiots they tend to be - found out that their little subculture was NOT immune to all the awful shit that plagues every other human interest. They, however, decided to start fighting back instead of just shrugging their shoulders and saying, "Oh well, everything's corrupt and awful, what can you do?" But the real root cause problem here is that people don't want to accept human nature, almost all people, on almost all sides.
    - acdha 6y ago
- msla 6y ago
  That works until the trolls' game is to shut down the channel of communication by crapflooding it. Spewbots and humans who act like them are nothing new. See a topic of discussion you feel is dangerous or merely not aligned with your core values? Send in the trolls and/or bots to spew hateful nonsense all over it until nothing else remains. Ignoring those trolls is precisely what they want: Ignore them, ignore the topic, ignore everything all the non-trolls are saying, move along, nothing to see here. Nifty little censorship tool if you can weaponize it effectively enough. DNFTT only works on pathological individual cases who care about what the community thinks of them.
- Pxtl 6y ago
  Or let them find each other and build their own little filter bubble of hate until they storm the US Capitol.

> They can exist because both of them are going to HAVE to learn how to engage with one another You're assuming good faith from both parties. Harassers and trolls don't act in good faith.

aaomidi 6y ago

And now with gpt3 we can create an endlessly creative bots of harassers!

nine_k 6y ago

There is a well-known recipe against trolls: do not feed them. Block and ignore them. If you visit a bathroom, you normally don't bloviate about the kind of crap you had just to flush, you rather avoid the topic; the same applies to trolls. Bring zero attention to them. Trolls' game is all about drawing attention, in the form of ire, offense, and and panic. Deprive them this, and they'll cease to bother you much. This is, of course, easier to do if you are a statue of buddha made of reinforced concrete, but even us living beings can learn and engage in some best practices of communication online.

nyanpasu64 6y ago
What happens if the trolls decide to bring explosives to blow up your Buddha statue?
- nine_k 6y ago
  I think it stretches the metaphor outside its charted range. OTOH using explosives is outright violence, and would likely be illegal by US federal laws.
- smsm42 6y ago
  We've witnessed hundreds of statues destroyed last year, from Abraham Lincoln to Cervantes. So we know the answer - if it's the right people doing blowing up, nothing happens, you have one statue left and you are forced to apologize for putting it up in the first place.
paulv 6y ago
Blocking, muting, or ignoring a handful of people may work. But when you have hundreds or thousands or more people harassing you, blocking them all isn't practical or sufficient. Get enough people mad at you and you'll end up being SWATted or doxxed (or turned in to deepfake porn). At some point the trolls start feeding each other. Next thing you know we end up with another gamergate (which started because some dude was mad at his ex).
- Grustaf 6y ago
  People can still SWAT you even after they've been banned from Twitter though.
acdha 6y ago
This approach only works if they don’t care about you. There’s a couple of decades of history by now showing how this approach fails, ranging from mass harassment (want to spend weeks blocking randos and sock puppets?) to attempts to contact your family and coworkers up to in-person harassment, placing Craigslist ads with your address saying you have violent rape fantasies, and SWATing. This is, of course, unevenly distributed. If you’re a white guy you have to work at it to get the same level of resentment in certain circles that other people start with by being female, brown, gay, etc. GamerGate is well worth learning about as an extreme example of how far it can get beyond the level where blocking works: it started with one person (Eron Gjoni) trying to clinch the “worst ex ever” title by rallying a hate mob against his ex girlfriend with some fake claims, which produced hate spasms for over a year, multiple police investigations, and fed into the 2016 US Presidential election. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy
- cbozeman 6y ago
  You were doing pretty good right up until you tried to channel GamerGame... that was a huge mistake. I get that you believe the "Official Party Line"(TM), but a lot of people don't, and a lot of us watched this whole thing unfold real-time across The Zoe Post, 4chan, reddit, and every other major venue on which it presented itself. Furthermore, some of us actually know the participants involved in a professional and private capacity. Yes, Gjoni "did a bad thing" by posting all the duplicitous shitty things Quinn did... but therein lies the rub. If you don't want to be called out for being a cheater who fucks game journalists for good reviews... then don't cheat on your boyfriend and fuck game journalists for reviews. It really is that goddamn simple. What GamerGate really was, was that gamers - the naive idiots they tend to be - found out that their little subculture was NOT immune to all the awful shit that plagues every other human interest. They, however, decided to start fighting back instead of just shrugging their shoulders and saying, "Oh well, everything's corrupt and awful, what can you do?" But the real root cause problem here is that people don't want to accept human nature, almost all people, on almost all sides.
  - acdha 6y ago
msla 6y ago
That works until the trolls' game is to shut down the channel of communication by crapflooding it. Spewbots and humans who act like them are nothing new. See a topic of discussion you feel is dangerous or merely not aligned with your core values? Send in the trolls and/or bots to spew hateful nonsense all over it until nothing else remains. Ignoring those trolls is precisely what they want: Ignore them, ignore the topic, ignore everything all the non-trolls are saying, move along, nothing to see here. Nifty little censorship tool if you can weaponize it effectively enough. DNFTT only works on pathological individual cases who care about what the community thinks of them.
Pxtl 6y ago
Or let them find each other and build their own little filter bubble of hate until they storm the US Capitol.