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.
The drawback of wanting to use software to handle the people who disagree with you is … hopefully obvious. I’m too tired to write it up.
But like you see the obvious problem with that, and why having human intelligence interacting with “the set of people I’m calling trolls” is necessary long term right?
Straight up, no, I don’t. I think that free speech online is kind of a perpetual techno-libertarian pipe dream that gets pushed at the behest of (mostly) corporate interests onto the optimistic and naive. If you let the trolls take an inch, they take a mile. I don’t even necessarily just mean like, white supremacist ideologues, or whatever, either, right, but I also mean like, corporate propaganda. Anyone with outstanding resources online can pretty easily sway public sentiment. People reported that you could buy upvotes on reddit, you can likewise buy comments, and if you play it correctly you can consistently dominate the front page. You can do this not only with reddit, but basically any other form of social media engagement as well.
This isn’t to advocate in favor of people self-isolating into echo chambers, right, it’s more to advocate for people just making more conscious decisions on who they engage with, which I think nobody tends to regularly do, because how social media works is that it preys on your base instincts and weaknesses. If you are to engage with a troll, a bad faith actor, you need to be getting something out of the exchange. You, personally. Maybe social shaming also works as a strategy for content moderation like that guy was saying, I dunno. But I think most people aren’t consciously making these decisions when they decide to engage with trolls, they’re just arguing nonsense points with someone who doesn’t give a shit about them, and then, you know, big shocker when they get frustrated and mad.
That’s not helping anyone to see alternative perspectives. If anything, it’s gonna cause people to become more reaffirmed in their own ideology, if they see that their only opposition is like, horrible dicks, basically. It’s not steel-manning the opposition, when that occurs. I mean, in some sense, that’s why trolling tends to happen most consistently, right? It’s because people want to venture outside their echo chamber, and get fresh meat, but then they do so in such a way that they’re engaging adversely, not putting in any effort, whatever, and then they just end up making everyone around them mad, and probably themselves, and then they fall deeper into their own ideology. Especially when their in-group has, knowingly or not, given them a kind of memetic scent that they (the troll) doesn’t fully understand, a marker that they’re someone from the outside. See: every time someone is able to explain communism to their conservative co-workers, who like it, so long as they don’t use the word “communism”. Million other examples along those lines. It’s like a mormon going door-to-door, or something
I think it’s probably a better case if you’re just letting everyone stay in their own zone, using heavy handed moderation to prevent this sort of dumb shit from occurring, and then occasionally you let people in if they’re showing that they’re acting in good faith, and are capable of like, actually offering good counterarguments and good viewpoints. If you’re wanting to have an actually good time on the internet then I think it’s probably gonna be better to hand those decisions off to someone else. Obviously that’s something you have to take on faith, but it’s much, much easier to actually engage with the stuff you want to, if you’re not falling victim to obvious rage bait every 10 posts.
I always kind of wonder generally why it is that the time-tested and great advice of “don’t feed the trolls”
For the same reason “if you see something, say something” would stop getting adhered to if people got sloppy, or self-serving, with their interpretations of the word “something”.
The concept of “troll” used to mean: Inducing a person to spend lots of effort responding to some nonsense, as a way of messing with them.
Now the word “troll” refers to: Any and all bad actors online. Which includes people who ask me politely for sources when I make bold claims. They’re the baddies, and I know because of this baddie checklist:
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.
The drawback of wanting to use software to handle the people who disagree with you is … hopefully obvious. I’m too tired to write it up.
But like you see the obvious problem with that, and why having human intelligence interacting with “the set of people I’m calling trolls” is necessary long term right?
Straight up, no, I don’t. I think that free speech online is kind of a perpetual techno-libertarian pipe dream that gets pushed at the behest of (mostly) corporate interests onto the optimistic and naive. If you let the trolls take an inch, they take a mile. I don’t even necessarily just mean like, white supremacist ideologues, or whatever, either, right, but I also mean like, corporate propaganda. Anyone with outstanding resources online can pretty easily sway public sentiment. People reported that you could buy upvotes on reddit, you can likewise buy comments, and if you play it correctly you can consistently dominate the front page. You can do this not only with reddit, but basically any other form of social media engagement as well.
This isn’t to advocate in favor of people self-isolating into echo chambers, right, it’s more to advocate for people just making more conscious decisions on who they engage with, which I think nobody tends to regularly do, because how social media works is that it preys on your base instincts and weaknesses. If you are to engage with a troll, a bad faith actor, you need to be getting something out of the exchange. You, personally. Maybe social shaming also works as a strategy for content moderation like that guy was saying, I dunno. But I think most people aren’t consciously making these decisions when they decide to engage with trolls, they’re just arguing nonsense points with someone who doesn’t give a shit about them, and then, you know, big shocker when they get frustrated and mad.
That’s not helping anyone to see alternative perspectives. If anything, it’s gonna cause people to become more reaffirmed in their own ideology, if they see that their only opposition is like, horrible dicks, basically. It’s not steel-manning the opposition, when that occurs. I mean, in some sense, that’s why trolling tends to happen most consistently, right? It’s because people want to venture outside their echo chamber, and get fresh meat, but then they do so in such a way that they’re engaging adversely, not putting in any effort, whatever, and then they just end up making everyone around them mad, and probably themselves, and then they fall deeper into their own ideology. Especially when their in-group has, knowingly or not, given them a kind of memetic scent that they (the troll) doesn’t fully understand, a marker that they’re someone from the outside. See: every time someone is able to explain communism to their conservative co-workers, who like it, so long as they don’t use the word “communism”. Million other examples along those lines. It’s like a mormon going door-to-door, or something
I think it’s probably a better case if you’re just letting everyone stay in their own zone, using heavy handed moderation to prevent this sort of dumb shit from occurring, and then occasionally you let people in if they’re showing that they’re acting in good faith, and are capable of like, actually offering good counterarguments and good viewpoints. If you’re wanting to have an actually good time on the internet then I think it’s probably gonna be better to hand those decisions off to someone else. Obviously that’s something you have to take on faith, but it’s much, much easier to actually engage with the stuff you want to, if you’re not falling victim to obvious rage bait every 10 posts.
For the same reason “if you see something, say something” would stop getting adhered to if people got sloppy, or self-serving, with their interpretations of the word “something”.
The concept of “troll” used to mean: Inducing a person to spend lots of effort responding to some nonsense, as a way of messing with them.
Now the word “troll” refers to: Any and all bad actors online. Which includes people who ask me politely for sources when I make bold claims. They’re the baddies, and I know because of this baddie checklist: