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.

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

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.

I realize that you might want to view your friends in a positive light but what I wrote is an accurate description of GamerGate (A lot of us saw this unfold, too). “ethics in journalism” was their favored excuse but the real cause was always the seething hatred for feminists and women not knowing their place. They ignored contemporaneous real ethical issues and focused on known-inaccurate excuses for the continued hate mob - for example, you’re still repeating their claim that Zoe Quinn slept with Nathan Grayson for good reviews, despite him not reviewing her games – something easily verified for anyone who cared to check.

"despite him not reviewing her games" The people he directly managed wrote 2 reviews. Stop pushing a lie.

The issue here acdha is that you failed to check.

Dude, it’s been almost 7 years, full of widely-recognized dishonesty and bad faith arguments by GamerGaters and fellow travelers. What do you think you’re going to accomplish by trying a new variation of an old claim conspicuously made without any evidence? Do you really think anyone is going to believe it, much less say it excuses what happened?

No one at the time ever claimed that the articles didn't exist, as you could just read the articles in question.

It was a revisionist lie added 6 to 8 months after the events.

Since you didn't bother to read the articles, there were 2 seperate articles both about Indie games in general. They both had sections on Depression Quest and both used Depression Quest for all the article's images. One of them at the bottom had a single hashtag #DepressionQuest on it. Both written by Nathan Grayson's subordinates.

Obviously, this isn't any different than large publishers giving the gaming journalists huge sacks of money, which they do.

The problem was it escalated out of control into the gaming journalists writing hit pieces on the gaming community as part of their damage control.

I'm sorry acdha but 7 years ago you were duped by hit piece articles.

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).

People can still SWAT you even after they've been banned from Twitter though.

Or let them find each other and build their own little filter bubble of hate until they storm the US Capitol.

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.

What happens if the trolls decide to bring explosives to blow up your Buddha statue?

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.

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.

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