You know I think I would modify that intention. I’ve found it’s better not to argue sort of, for some third party observer, or, to argue just to wear them down, but I think it’s better to argue just for yourself, for your own sake. It still kind of requires a good ability for discernment, but if you can find a sealion that can keep you sharp, that’s probably good enough. Less noble is maybe just arguing with them because you personally find it amusing, which is also probably not a terrible thing.
Generally, though, I always kind of wonder generally why it is that the time-tested and great advice of “don’t feed the trolls” has tended to fall by the wayside over the years, if it was ever really followed at all. I suppose only one person needs to falter to register as an engagement, but it’s pretty hard for an uncoordinated effort to end up flooding a site with propaganda, because people just tend to give up (or in lots of instances, self-isolate, which is maybe a different problem) if they get ignored enough.
I find “Don’t feed the trolls” is less of a concern on a site like Lemmy that filters by up and down votes. The trolls get filtered to the bottom and don’t clutter everyone’s feeds. The more of the troll’s time I waste the less they can spend trolling other people.
Something like Steam Community Forums where a thread gets bumped to the top every time it receives a new reply, dear God stop feeding the trolls! It makes it an unusable mess.
Something like Steam Community Forums where a thread gets bumped to the top every time it receives a new reply, dear God stop feeding the trolls! It makes it an unusable mess.
I would argue, probably poorly, that this also happens to a much, much lesser extent when you feed a troll on a site like lemmy.
Nah, my concern is kind of more that trolls, truly bad faith arguers, should ideally be handled more by functions like spam filters and good moderation, than being this sort of thing that we constantly have to juggle around, shaking keys in front of their faces in order to distract them from responding to one person. In a trolling war, where you have to troll the trolls, the trolls always win. There’s some blogpost that I can no longer dig up from my internet history, about how similar lessons were learned in EVE Online, by people trying to win wars of attrition against the Goonswarm, the in-game SomethingAwful board users.
The takeaway from the writeup was kinda that the only effective countermeasures is basically just to kind of, have more effective moderation, and banning people who would take it too far.
Edit: browsing down a little more, your approach to just, have them suffer death by a million papercuts, and maybe just kind of expose them and publically shame them, rather than engage in a protracted counter-trolling kind of thing, that makes sense to me as a strategy I hadn’t really considered. Probably an effective one, too, especially as multiple strategies tend to increase in efficacy as they lend themselves to one another. So, neat.
You know I think I would modify that intention. I’ve found it’s better not to argue sort of, for some third party observer, or, to argue just to wear them down, but I think it’s better to argue just for yourself, for your own sake. It still kind of requires a good ability for discernment, but if you can find a sealion that can keep you sharp, that’s probably good enough. Less noble is maybe just arguing with them because you personally find it amusing, which is also probably not a terrible thing.
Generally, though, I always kind of wonder generally why it is that the time-tested and great advice of “don’t feed the trolls” has tended to fall by the wayside over the years, if it was ever really followed at all. I suppose only one person needs to falter to register as an engagement, but it’s pretty hard for an uncoordinated effort to end up flooding a site with propaganda, because people just tend to give up (or in lots of instances, self-isolate, which is maybe a different problem) if they get ignored enough.
I find “Don’t feed the trolls” is less of a concern on a site like Lemmy that filters by up and down votes. The trolls get filtered to the bottom and don’t clutter everyone’s feeds. The more of the troll’s time I waste the less they can spend trolling other people.
Something like Steam Community Forums where a thread gets bumped to the top every time it receives a new reply, dear God stop feeding the trolls! It makes it an unusable mess.
I would argue, probably poorly, that this also happens to a much, much lesser extent when you feed a troll on a site like lemmy.
Nah, my concern is kind of more that trolls, truly bad faith arguers, should ideally be handled more by functions like spam filters and good moderation, than being this sort of thing that we constantly have to juggle around, shaking keys in front of their faces in order to distract them from responding to one person. In a trolling war, where you have to troll the trolls, the trolls always win. There’s some blogpost that I can no longer dig up from my internet history, about how similar lessons were learned in EVE Online, by people trying to win wars of attrition against the Goonswarm, the in-game SomethingAwful board users.
The takeaway from the writeup was kinda that the only effective countermeasures is basically just to kind of, have more effective moderation, and banning people who would take it too far.
Edit: browsing down a little more, your approach to just, have them suffer death by a million papercuts, and maybe just kind of expose them and publically shame them, rather than engage in a protracted counter-trolling kind of thing, that makes sense to me as a strategy I hadn’t really considered. Probably an effective one, too, especially as multiple strategies tend to increase in efficacy as they lend themselves to one another. So, neat.