It's not that the "trolls are winning", it's that people are allowing the trolls to bother them. Trolls have always existed; it's our heightened sensitivity and inability to just shrug them off or laugh in the face of their obscenity that's letting them "win".
Yeah this is bullshit. Trolls have always existed, but shrugging them off was never a solution.
In message boards I used to frequent trolls were suspended without question and banned for repeat offenses. Now when trolls get banned there is an out cry from the troll and those in line with them about censorship and violation of their free speech.
The problem is trolls are given too much room to play and speak.
The conflict is that reddit originally touted itself as a meta-community, where such moderation was applied per-subreddit. If you didn't like the topics/policies of one community, then start another right alongside.
But the desire of investors for widespread palatability and the media's latest push for censorship have perverted the site into creating unified "community standards", across what should be considered independent communities.
Reddit itself gained much of its popularity due to the mass exodus from Digg over their censorship of one simple number! Users inherently do not want to be censored in what they can communicate about, and so the cycle will be with us until we finally scrap this hack of using centralized websites in lieu of end-user software - centralized structures can never remain free of top-down control.
The other problem is that several subreddits were known to "leak," where the subscribers to some subreddits would go out and spread that kind of thing across the rest of the site. If the racist content stays in their subreddits, it's still terrible that it's there, but at least it can be firewalled off. But when the users of those subreddits start spreading that content through the rest of the site, it's much more difficult to avoid it.
For me the issue is the broad application of troll and liberal banning. I was all on board the detoxify train until I was banned from a subreddit where I had posted for 5 years.
I didn’t know what comment or behavior. Messaging mods said that it was obvious what comment and that I was a troll.
This was confusing to me. I never went back. Now I am skeptical of labeled trolls unless I can assess behavior directly.
> Yeah this is bullshit. Trolls have always existed, but shrugging them off was never a solution.
> In message boards I used to frequent trolls were suspended without question and banned for repeat offenses.
That must be selective memory, or at least not generalizable: on some pretty major message boards (e.g. Slashdot), trolling became a prominent subculture.
In fact, one of the my major memories of numerous early message boards was that trolling was an integral component of the forum culture. Trollish things would frequently be said and you spotted the newbies and outsiders based on how they responded. As you learned the culture, you'd learn not to get trolled and maybe occasionally troll yourself.
> The problem is trolls are given too much room to play and speak.
That's the problem with your mindset right there.
We are talking about people. To decide that other people cannot say things you do not like to hear is to deny them their liberty. That clearly worse than "trolling".
Getting offended by a person's words or actions is not them doing something to you, it's you doing something to them - or rather, to yourself.
So if you can't - or shouldn't - compel other people to think and act in a certain manner, what do you do?
No, trolls have not existed in the form they exist since the emergence of the internet. Self-censorship is a wonderful thing. And the way it works is: you say dumb things (especially as a kid), you get slapped by your parents/friends/people around you. By age 18 or 21, you know instinctively that what you can and cannot say around other folks. At least the vast majority of folks do.
On the internet however, there's no real sense of human interaction and the repercussions are usually minimal.
Real life trolling is probably 1/10k of internet trolling.
> So your answer to people you don't like is corporal punishment.
A) Who said it's my answer?
B) Just because I listed corporal punishment, it doesn't mean it's the only one form of punishment used.
That how society works, especially for kids. Kids are jerks to each other. After a childhood of interacting with jerks, we learn what we can and cannot say. We react to stimuli. A huge chunk of these stimuli is negative, i.e. a form of punishment.
Does it improve discourse? I believe it does, not all of it is negative. It forces us to learn and to better ourselves.
Obviously it shouldn't be the only form of interaction. You also need the carrot, not only the stick.
But the internet proved that the "stick" is there for a reason. You either have a "carrot" for everything (impossible, and also doesn't work, since people get used to rewards and become desensitized to them after a while) or you need at least the threat of a "stick".
No one needs to change anything. The internet existed for years without this being an issue.
If you encounter someone on the internet who is annoying you, most platforms give you the option to block them. You do that, then move on with your life. It's not hard.
The internet did not exist in its present form, extent of influence, flexibility, etc., without this being an issue for any length of time. Don't lie to yourself.
Its also impossible. You're not going to have a close conversation with a group of people when a little kid is jumping up and down and screaming for attention in public. Ignoring them doesn't work for either trolls or bullys. Either they run the show, or you do something about them, end of story.
> Ignoring them doesn't work for either trolls or bullys.
This goes against decades of received wisdom: DNFTT, anyone?
For what it's worth, I agree with you, and I always thought simply not feeding trolls was pointless: There's something similar to a broken window effect in terms of overall tone. If someone comes to a site, sees a lot of negative comments and general asshattery, they'll file that place away as "where the asshats are" even if those comments are being studiously ignored by the regulars. That means the only ones who want to comment there will be the ones who want to act like what they see around them: asshat trolls.
I also think that ignoring them until they go away is a bad strategy: Even if you ignore one or two of them successfully, there's dozens if not hundreds of them waiting to join. You can't outwait them all without the community degenerating due to the broken window effect I mentioned above.
I kind of took your first sentence and started replying to it by saying about what you said afterwards - I thought that was your main point! My typed reply:
> Do not feed the trolls only solves the problem in smaller communities, or at least only just holds off the effects of the troll (topics spinning out of control, pointless arguing, accusations and recriminations) until they can be moderated. Its not a solution for a community, and never has been.
It doesnt work now, and with the diversification and use of the net by vulnerable groups.
Having a users on a generalist forum suddenly exposed to flashing lights to induce a seizure, or ambushed by images of dead people, or being attacked for being a woman or a minority group?
Yeah you cannot expect people to shrug that off, without also expecting a large mass of humanity to be essentially living without a normal emotional response.
I just don’t think saying “people shouldn’t let themselves be bothered” is at all a viable solution. Automated troll detection is clearly a hard problem, but I’m not convinced it’s unsolveable. Whereas getting people to not be bothered is, unless people start living forever and have no offspring, by its very nature a commitment without end.
Yet much more modest than the policing of content that Facebook and the like seems to be interested in.
That goes double when it’s two clicks to permanently dismiss someone from your attention. The best troll repellant is and always has been to ignore them.
How about you ask the people that US soldiers protect, like the people liberated from living under the dictatorship of Saddam, whether they're cool with US soldiers?
It's so funny to see people ignore all the tremendous amount of good that US soldiers and the military have done in the modern era for different peoples and nations and obsessively focus on the relatively few individual bad actors and examples of clear military wrongdoing. It's naive.
I used to teach jiu-jitsu to an Iraqi Kurd asylum seeker in London. Despite his own people being gassed, he preferred Saddam. If you kept on the right side of the powers-that-be, you could run businesses and have a life. This is in contrast to the anarchy that ensued after the West's invasion.
Thanks USA for keeping bases on my country's sea and soil, meddling with internal politics and also thank you very much for the random civilian accidents when your kind soldiers are too drunk to, at least, be kind to the land you are raping for your own good. Some more wine, kind sir?
Whatever valid point you have is neutralized by your crossing into personal attack and snark. Those things violate the site guidelines, so please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do those things here.
I'll explain. OP has a problem where they see the members of the US military as virtuous because they "help" some people. But, militaries kill people which is the worst thing you can do to a person. OP has been radicalized by an ideology that the US military was a good influence in Iraq, but the opposite is true. The US military was very bad for Iraq. They directly and indirectly killed hundreds of thousands of people. This is a big fuck up. When people fuck up, they should apologize or be very quiet. OP is doing the opposite. OP is proud of the US military fucking up Iraq. OP is even claiming that Iraq did not get fucked up, but that it was helped. This is obviously impossible because being killed is not good for you.
It's hard to fully comprehend the impact of new energy sources on civilization. So much of what we do is only possible because we have the necessary energy at our disposal.
When civilization finds new energy sources, most other technologies level up as well.
Consider one of the biggest problems with desalinization systems: pumping water inland. The actual separation of salt from seawater isn't the most energy intensive part of the process. Desalinization works great for wealthy coastal communities.
But a large nation like the US or China would never be able to fulfill the water demand of its people through desalinization alone because the cost of transporting coastal water inland would be prohibitive.
Enter something like fusion, which is orders of magnitude more efficient on a per pound of fuel basis than fossil fuels and something like distributing water to everyone in the US from the coasts becomes possible.
I wonder if extra dissipated heat while doing this would contribute to global warming. But probably scale of adding heat directly to atmosphere isn't comparable to insulation effect of CO2
It's really not something I've ever found myself bothered by. I've only learned in the past few years that some people actually have a problem with it, to the point of calling it "madness" apparently.
Really people? This seems to be more a symptom of complainers needing something to complain about and clickbait machines churning than anything else.
