Can anyone provide a defense (from Zed or anyone) for the idea that a healthy community needs trolls? I can understand the need for dissent and argument, but it seems to me that trolling is categorically different from those.
Trolls are the predators of internet communities. They prey on the sick, the weak, and the perennially outraged (mostly this last group) and, if they are successful, drive them away from the community. A community without perennially outraged people is better than a community with them.
The question is whether this benefit is worth the potential cost, which is probably something that almost entirely dependent on the nature of the community and the personalities of the trolls involved.
Edit: By "perennially outraged", I am referring to people who are constantly angry or miserable for no reason other than that such an emotional state is "what they do". They aren't trolls themselves, any more than a particularly unpleasant customer is a troll. They're just constantly unhappy and vocal about it.
Generally there's three classes of trolls (this is just my opinion):
Griefers are what you describe. People who are more interested in gaming the implied social norms of the community in order to destroy it. These people suck, but totally blocking them eliminates the second class:
Dissenters are people who just disagree with you, and considering nearly every open source project is started by opinionated dissenters it's just bound to happen. I believe that without these people though your project dies because your ideas stagnate and you never really deal with actual criticism until it's too late. Also, they may just be the vocal part of your user base that wants something you don't.
Finally, moderators who use their moderation powers to "indirectly troll". By this I mean people who unilaterally deny people's communications because it would interfere with their hidden agendas. If you go look at nearly every failed community, at the heart is someone like this.
What I think, and what we'll find out, is that what really drives people away is not the presence of all of these, but the dominance of one of these types of "trolls". My idea is to just balance them out and give the community a real vote on what is what.
I think usenet can speak to the problem of trolls ruinging the community. Which is why web forms came to dominate, despite usenet's superiority in technical features and access (most people had email clients before web browsers).
Usenet was ruined by a small number of people who were trying to ruin others reputations by posting all sorts of insane diatribes to the group. Plus the spammers. Uggg... the spamemrs.
Your assumption is that it's impossible to differentiate category one from category two. I see no reason for that to be true.
Here's a question for you: If you moderate a list, do you let subscribers see what you've moderated and why? If it's for the benefit of the mailing list community, then why not?
If I did moderate a list (which I don't), and there was an ability for subscribers to see the raw feed, I'd allow that. I am curious if your approach will work. It's similar to how things operate here, but I wonder if it can work with no moderators. (HN does have editors who monitor flagged articles and comments.)
When you don't have to worry about if someone's being a troll or not real conversation happens.
This allows the creation of lists whose entire purpose is trolling each other (i.e. trolls trolling trolls trolling trolls...). Or in general if I think that the 'troll' flag is 'censorship,' then I have the option to disable people (on my list at least) from using it.
edit: fixed a typo
Most of the places on the Internet where I hang out, the trolls like the community they are a part of and are rather uninterested in destroying it. They do their thing primarily to get an emotional reaction out of people, and the easiest people to get an emotional reaction out of are the people who are constantly emotional. Because the overlap between permanently unhappy people and the "good" people (the latter group consisting of, e.g., core devs, or mods, or various other "central" members of the community) is (for most types of communities that I'm interested in) pretty small, that's not really a problem.
On the other hand, turning 4chan loose on a Neopets mailing list would probably end badly for the community, yes.
Over at kuro5hin.org we experienced a 'trollocaust' as it were, wherein the trolls successfully drove all the emotional beautiful souls off to another site (hulver.com). If the critical mass of trolls grows too large, community can't really be sustained.
Perhaps in some way it is better to have "troll trolls" than people who appear to be normal but are actually very trollish. I remember a community where a bunch of people would just answer all questions with:
"OMG WTF? NOT THIS AGAIN. Use the search FFS."
Now this was more or less encouraged behaviour as Admins and Mods did this but these guys took it too far. So it eventually was trolling all but in name.
To be honest i'm not sure I believe all that but at least he has a "troll rating" system.
In other words, with the librelist code, it IS possible to have a middle land where the community can voice their opinion of what's spam or troll without eliminating real dissenting opinions and debate.
I certainly look forward to a community where the "owner" is less able to control people's input according to their own tastes.
Stackoverflow has recently banned swearing.... because. This the kind of thing that pisses me off.
Nothing to allow tyranny of the minority or majority. It’s all about free speech and open communication.
However, this is balanced with the above spam marking, and potentially a “troll rating” that’s similar to a spam rating.Of course presumably there will still be people with the authority to remove really bad examples like that. But will they have the time to look after the many many lists which will probably soon exist?
On the inverse side, I think I'll also track your voting rates, and if you tend to rate too many people as trolls or spam then your voting will also be throttled.
But, it's also just a plan. The goal is to create something that lets communities moderate themselves without too much tyranny of the majority of minority. That's why the code is open, so that people with ideas about how to do that can help make it happen.
Maybe deliver to people in a reputation order and slight delay to allow the damage to be minimized?
So yeah, you'll get some spam. Install a spam filter and just accept that's the price you pay for being on the internet, and we'll do our best to reduce it.
While I like the idea, I'm not sure it's a good idea to label it as such in the interface.
You might also have a hard time figuring out the genuine flaggings from the ones made by spambots...
For fucks sake trolls are just people who do things. They aren't magical beings that need to be warned off or they will eat you.
In Adult World we deal with simply don't give attention to attention wanters.
I'm not saying this to troll, I can just imagine lots of situations where I may want to set up a mailing list, but few where I want that list to become some sort of anarchic debating society where someone else's software handles the moderation for me.
Maybe I'll call it the "tin foil hat" release of Librelist. :-)
Overall it looks nice. The most interesting/controversial bit to me is the following (taken from librelist.com):
Nobody Can Be Taken Off
The “libre” in the name means freedom for everyone to discuss their opinions, so nobody will have the right to boot you off or enforce arbitrary “list Nazi” rules simply because you disagree with them.
That of course doesn’t mean you should act like a jerk, but the librelist.com philosophy is that healthy communities can survive and need “trolls”.