No, not hardly at all.

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 there's one more, people are like Griefers except way worse.

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.

We have different definitions of "troll." Your second category does not fit into mine; I do not consider someone who is genuinely trying to communicate to be a troll.

Your assumption is that it's impossible to differentiate category one from category two. I see no reason for that to be true.

Nope, I never said it was impossible to differentiate, I just said that the differentiation shouldn't be controlled by a few people who potentially won't understand the difference.

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?

You should make this clear on librelist.com; right now, it appears that there will be no mechanism to deal with trolls.

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.)

I'm curious if also that could bring up another model: lists can be moderated, but there's "Sousveillance" on the moderators with feedback rating from the community. That way, you get moderators, but people who are member get to see if you're just crushing dissenting opinion. People could then see that your moderation style is rated at "Nazi" and just not join.

Wouldn't this become a sort of Ycombinator/Reddit style voting list? Not that it's a bad thing but just an interesting thought.

You'd be surprised I bet at how much actually gets talked about on any number of 4chan boards.

When you don't have to worry about if someone's being a troll or not real conversation happens.

The suckless mailinglist is a mailing list that seems to accept, if not encourage, the second type of trolling. It would be interesting to build some statistics from it's archives to see when and who abandoned the list. I think you are right, Zed, in that getting rid of the first type get's rid of the second type and empowers the third type. I also agree that the second type is very good for the community. Just look at the development that goes on in the suckless community, some really great stuff.

How about the ability for the list creator/moderator to enable/disable the 'troll' flagging functionality for their mailinglist.

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

Trolls drive away the GOOD people, not the weak/sick ones. They're more like a fungus infection than like a predator.

I think who they end up driving away is mostly determined by the kind of community and the kind of trolls.

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.

4chan users are not trolls. They're griefers and sociopaths. Like you said, trolls are generally part of a community, or make an attempt to get a rise out of people through détournement, not through outright antagonism.

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.

If we define the emotional state of a person relative to the sort of messages they send to the list, rather than their "true" emotional state, which is more relevant to the list, the the trolls create "perennially outraged" people. I don't think that argument works.