Yeah this is bullshit. Trolls have always existed, but shrugging them off was never a solution.

In message boards I used to frequent trolls were suspended without question and banned for repeat offenses. Now when trolls get banned there is an out cry from the troll and those in line with them about censorship and violation of their free speech.

The problem is trolls are given too much room to play and speak.

The conflict is that reddit originally touted itself as a meta-community, where such moderation was applied per-subreddit. If you didn't like the topics/policies of one community, then start another right alongside.

But the desire of investors for widespread palatability and the media's latest push for censorship have perverted the site into creating unified "community standards", across what should be considered independent communities.

Reddit itself gained much of its popularity due to the mass exodus from Digg over their censorship of one simple number! Users inherently do not want to be censored in what they can communicate about, and so the cycle will be with us until we finally scrap this hack of using centralized websites in lieu of end-user software - centralized structures can never remain free of top-down control.

The other problem is that several subreddits were known to "leak," where the subscribers to some subreddits would go out and spread that kind of thing across the rest of the site. If the racist content stays in their subreddits, it's still terrible that it's there, but at least it can be firewalled off. But when the users of those subreddits start spreading that content through the rest of the site, it's much more difficult to avoid it.

For me the issue is the broad application of troll and liberal banning. I was all on board the detoxify train until I was banned from a subreddit where I had posted for 5 years.

I didn’t know what comment or behavior. Messaging mods said that it was obvious what comment and that I was a troll.

This was confusing to me. I never went back. Now I am skeptical of labeled trolls unless I can assess behavior directly.

> Yeah this is bullshit. Trolls have always existed, but shrugging them off was never a solution.

> In message boards I used to frequent trolls were suspended without question and banned for repeat offenses.

That must be selective memory, or at least not generalizable: on some pretty major message boards (e.g. Slashdot), trolling became a prominent subculture.

In fact, one of the my major memories of numerous early message boards was that trolling was an integral component of the forum culture. Trollish things would frequently be said and you spotted the newbies and outsiders based on how they responded. As you learned the culture, you'd learn not to get trolled and maybe occasionally troll yourself.

> The problem is trolls are given too much room to play and speak.

That's the problem with your mindset right there.

We are talking about people. To decide that other people cannot say things you do not like to hear is to deny them their liberty. That clearly worse than "trolling".

Getting offended by a person's words or actions is not them doing something to you, it's you doing something to them - or rather, to yourself.

So if you can't - or shouldn't - compel other people to think and act in a certain manner, what do you do?

The answer is simple: show them the door.

No, trolls have not existed in the form they exist since the emergence of the internet. Self-censorship is a wonderful thing. And the way it works is: you say dumb things (especially as a kid), you get slapped by your parents/friends/people around you. By age 18 or 21, you know instinctively that what you can and cannot say around other folks. At least the vast majority of folks do.

On the internet however, there's no real sense of human interaction and the repercussions are usually minimal.

Real life trolling is probably 1/10k of internet trolling.

Ok so some random person is saying something you find offensive or hurtful. You can block them so you don't have to see what they post.

It's a decentralized solution to a decentralized problem.

Not everyone finds the blocking option in time.

Not everyone has the self control to avoid the comments in the first place.

Not everything you've seen can be erased and forgotten (there's a reason NSFL exists).

You don't seem to have any clue about how prolific trolls can be, and how persistant their threats are.

I would encourage you to look up the GamerGate scandal from a few years ago, and update your knowledge on the topic of online trolling/harassment.

So your answer to people you don't like is corporal punishment.

Do you honestly believe that is the best method to improve discourse?

> So your answer to people you don't like is corporal punishment.

A) Who said it's my answer?

B) Just because I listed corporal punishment, it doesn't mean it's the only one form of punishment used.

That how society works, especially for kids. Kids are jerks to each other. After a childhood of interacting with jerks, we learn what we can and cannot say. We react to stimuli. A huge chunk of these stimuli is negative, i.e. a form of punishment.

Does it improve discourse? I believe it does, not all of it is negative. It forces us to learn and to better ourselves.

Obviously it shouldn't be the only form of interaction. You also need the carrot, not only the stick.

But the internet proved that the "stick" is there for a reason. You either have a "carrot" for everything (impossible, and also doesn't work, since people get used to rewards and become desensitized to them after a while) or you need at least the threat of a "stick".

Ah, the old "We just need to change human behaviour" solution. Yeah, that would definitely work if it worked.

Stopping trolling is the same. People will always troll. If there’s a text input on a site, it will get trolled.

When's the last time you saw someone smoking a cigarette?

10 minutes ago? I get your point though, smoking has gone down. Would you be open to raising taxes on trolling?

No one needs to change anything. The internet existed for years without this being an issue.

If you encounter someone on the internet who is annoying you, most platforms give you the option to block them. You do that, then move on with your life. It's not hard.

That is an incredibly naive view of harassment in an era of doxing, swatting and revenge porn.

The internet did not exist in its present form, extent of influence, flexibility, etc., without this being an issue for any length of time. Don't lie to yourself.

And how do you do that when they come at you by the thousands?

And do so in a way that doesn't boil down to a blame the victim solution of simply leaving the platform?

Trying to get everyone to not be bothered by trolls is a massive and neverending undertaking.

Its also impossible. You're not going to have a close conversation with a group of people when a little kid is jumping up and down and screaming for attention in public. Ignoring them doesn't work for either trolls or bullys. Either they run the show, or you do something about them, end of story.

> Ignoring them doesn't work for either trolls or bullys.

This goes against decades of received wisdom: DNFTT, anyone?

For what it's worth, I agree with you, and I always thought simply not feeding trolls was pointless: There's something similar to a broken window effect in terms of overall tone. If someone comes to a site, sees a lot of negative comments and general asshattery, they'll file that place away as "where the asshats are" even if those comments are being studiously ignored by the regulars. That means the only ones who want to comment there will be the ones who want to act like what they see around them: asshat trolls.

I also think that ignoring them until they go away is a bad strategy: Even if you ignore one or two of them successfully, there's dozens if not hundreds of them waiting to join. You can't outwait them all without the community degenerating due to the broken window effect I mentioned above.

I kind of took your first sentence and started replying to it by saying about what you said afterwards - I thought that was your main point! My typed reply:

> Do not feed the trolls only solves the problem in smaller communities, or at least only just holds off the effects of the troll (topics spinning out of control, pointless arguing, accusations and recriminations) until they can be moderated. Its not a solution for a community, and never has been.

DNFTT worked in an older era.

It doesnt work now, and with the diversification and use of the net by vulnerable groups.

Having a users on a generalist forum suddenly exposed to flashing lights to induce a seizure, or ambushed by images of dead people, or being attacked for being a woman or a minority group?

Yeah you cannot expect people to shrug that off, without also expecting a large mass of humanity to be essentially living without a normal emotional response.

But policing the expression of wide (and fluidly defined) swaths of thought that some believe to be "toxic" isn't?

I just don’t think saying “people shouldn’t let themselves be bothered” is at all a viable solution. Automated troll detection is clearly a hard problem, but I’m not convinced it’s unsolveable. Whereas getting people to not be bothered is, unless people start living forever and have no offspring, by its very nature a commitment without end.

Yet much more modest than the policing of content that Facebook and the like seems to be interested in.

That goes double when it’s two clicks to permanently dismiss someone from your attention. The best troll repellant is and always has been to ignore them.