Re:Are Trolls Ruining Social Media?
by michael_dorfman on Thursday June 11, 2009 @02:12PM
(#653262)
...and I'm willing to bet that a classically trained violinist with a sufficiently large following would prove a very attractive target to trolls.
Are there really places on the internet you can "go to have health, civil debates" that are a) troll-free, and b) unmoderated? The world has neighborhoods, each one tnds to have its own police force.
Everything is moderated to the extent that you can choose to remove yourself from the situation. Moderation in some form has to exist to limit the chaos. It's not black and white either, sure anyone of a certain level of popularity will get trolls to some extent, you are right. That happens in real life too. I'm just saying that it matters 'where' the discourse is taking place and it matters who is involved. If you and I where having this conversation on Reddit, somebody would probably have trolled us already.
Big names (Like Reznor) have fans who follow them to whatever online neighborhood they may move into. Reznors' experience may say more about the type of people his music attracts than it does about the internet at large. There are plenty of well-know people who are able to use the internet as a way to engage a readership in meaningful ways, and a lot of it has to do with the audience they attract. If Reznor was a classically trained Violinist, for instance, I'm willing to bet his foray into social media would have had a different result.