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Disarm Internet Trolls, Gently
Shlomi Fish writes "The best way to react to people trolling on Internet forums is not to feed them, right? Wrong! 'Don't feed the trolls' is also usually ineffective. Luckily, however, there is more effective approach, inspired by the book Feeling Good by David D. Burns."
Sounds pretty gay.
Just don't respond, add them to your ignore list and do something more productive.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
That anus is impressively enlarged. Thank you for sharing it with us. What made you first think about posting it on slashdot?
You suck!...
Kinda...
Eh, actually you're not so bad...
In fact you're kinda cute...
Wanna go out tomorrow night?...
Nervous?.. Yeah, a little
First time?... No, I've been nervous lots of times
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
http://www.ehow.com/how_2064125_become-internet-troll.html
The above URI has some helpful hints for noobs who might want to get into trolling
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
... develop a strong sense of self-worth & recognise that someone throwing profanities at you who has never met you is entirely unimportant.
Get over that, then you can have fun baiting them, reeling them in, playing with them a while, then throwing them back when you're bored.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Winner!
First, contrary to TFA, this has zero to do with cognitive behavioral therapy.
Second, it won't work with an experienced troll. Either don't feed them, or feed them a brick to the face. But if they're that experienced, both approaches will fail.
Third, recognize that there are "white hat" and "black hat" trolls.
Fourth, one person's troll or flamebait is another person's insightful.
Fifth, take it for what it is - whether it's the use of rhetoric as a debating artifice, a way to expose stupid arguments for what they are (because it's easier to troll an idiot than it is to educate them), or just another form of entertainment.
Sixth, people who go nuts over YHBT YFI HAND are the real trollbait.
The author seems to be using "troll" as a term for "someone posting in an inflammatory manner," but I thought "troll" specifically referred to posters doing it to get a rise out of people. Responding in a reasonable manner isn't going to help if the other party isn't interested in taking the conversation seriously.
The approach he gives is good for preventing disagreements from turning into flamewars, but it is worthless and even counterproductive for dealing with real trolls. Reading the article he seems unaware of the fact that people who troll do it simply to get a rise out of people. Any response (even a calm boring one) just gives them another opportunity to respond, which increases the chance that someone else will eventually bite the bait.
If someone really is trolling, then ignoring them is the best thing to do. Having moderation systems to keep them out-of-sight out-of-mind will help with people who can't control the urge to feed the trolls.
Finally, while it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between a troll and and an angry rant, I don't have any problem treating them the same in general forums. When talking with people that you will see again (like work, friends, family, or development mailing lists) and you know they genuinely disagree with you then it is worthwhile to keep the peace and follow the suggestions here. But on a random discussion forum, "if you can't be civil you will be ignored" is good policy IMHO.
1. What do you mean by feeding the trolls? I'm sure you don't really want them to starve to death.
2. I agree with you that it is difficult to have to put up with trolls. I hope, however, that the inner-tubes are big enough for everyone; maybe we can work together to find a nice bridge for the trolls to live under. It may seem a bit harsh, but if we fed them a few goats now and again, maybe they will feel better about themselves and move on to greener pastures.
3. If we can keep the trolls from offending us, then cyber-area can benefit from the diversity. I saw a documentary once where even an Ogre - I know they are different from trolls, but they share some common disagreeable characteristics - befriended a donkey, and they seemed to have a genuinely witty banter and joie de vivre. I read in the newspaper that the Ogre recently even married; so there is some possibility we can live together.
yeah, I guess it kinda works.
The definition of "troll" has changed. It used to be, back in the good old USENET days, a troll was someone who intentionally took an outrageous viewpoint, purely to generate responses and enjoy the excitement of being in the center of attention.
Now, "troll" is anyone who disagrees. I've seen some pretty bad abuses on other forums, where someone advances a reasonable idea that doesn't dovetail with the way the group prefers to perceive reality, and is instantly labeled a troll and banned. The trend is self-reinforcing over time. Result: groupthink. The meaning of "normal" gets distorted as the goalposts move farther and farther away from the world outside the forum. This is especially jarring when these folks move out to a mainstream forum like Slashdot and nobody shares their preconceptions.
You can see it in the linked article, the author's examples such as "You are on a Vim channel" - who the F spends time on a "Vim channel"? Himself and his tiny group, I'm sure. Jeez, the guy bought and is reading a self-help book called "Feeling Good"...obviously he has major life problems that the rest of us consider lameass Stuart Smalley territory "I deserve good things. I am entitled to my share of happiness. I refuse to beat myself up. I am attractive person. I am fun to be with." OMG TROLL -1
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Trolls have been around for as long as individuals have been communicating online. From what I understand, they're essentially lonely, attention seeking people. Even if you do engage one in dialog, what then? All you're doing is feeding their addiction. There are just too many of them to warrant trying to help them all (and trying that may point to bugs in your own personality, too)
No, the best course is to killfile them or use whatever options your forum implementation has to achieve the same results. You don't raise your signal to noise ratio by trying to negotiate with the noise, you just filter it out and try to make sense of what remains.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
at the shoulder. Extra points for getting some collarbone as well.
GStreamer - The only way to stream!
Then proceed to beat them to death with said arms.
I find it particularly therapeutic and cathartic.. for me, that is. The trolls don't generally survive the encounter. :)
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
Why not isolate the trolls by showing their comments only to themselves, but not to other readers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Internet)
when you respond, you did exactly what the troll wanted you to do.
The super-executive summary for this post is: "On the Internet, don't be right - be smart."
Like the two are mutually exclusive?
How dumb can you be?
The article is troll-bait.
You want to know what I miss? (shut up, of course you do!) I miss when /. had really good trolls. Remember them? The ones that took pride in their trolling? The ones that would spend all day cooking up offensive ASCII art or writing a shit eater or ass rape troll that like a fine novel didn't give away its true intention until nearly the end?
Man we used to have some damned fine trolling here, not the lame "Nigger nigger faggot faggot" crap spewed from Halo fratboys on 4chan and Digg, no trolls that were PROUD to be trolls and took pride in their work. Even our crazies were a cut above the rest, folks like Twitter that could spin a dozen sockpuppets into one giant conspiracy fueled fantasy around MSFT and the Illuminati. Now THAT was some damned fine trolling!
Sadly now our trolls are as cheap and badly made as a Chinese knockoff iPod, just no pride in the work anymore. Even our crazies have lost their flair,like MichaelK with his endless copies of his name with a number after it just so he can type "pathetic" and have it not at -1, or the HOSTS guy that capitalizes every other word like that makes his crazy more powerful or something, just no subtlety or finesse at all.
I'm sure the great trolls of the past are looking down from under their bridge in the sky and hanging their heads in shame. Oh and of course trying to shake their dicks at us, but unlike the lousy trolls of today they have a chorus line going with all the wieners having tassels and spinning in time like the pasties on a Vegas showgirl. Its all in the presentation you see, something the trolls of today just don't get. Personally I blame reality programming and MTV.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
"...stupid git."
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Am I the first to notice that the owner of the blog and author of the blog post that was linked to is the same person who made the submission to Slashdot?
Sent from my iPhone
The linked-to article was written by one Schlomi Fish, who is a kind of programming language troll.
I wrote a very nice Lisp program once upon a time, and Fish wrote a critique one of whose main points is that I should have written it in a different programming language, quote:
If Meta-CVS' author wishes to make it more popular, I strongly advise him to re-implement it in C, Perl, Python or something more standard.
So we can take this new article to be a kind of insider's guide to trolling, I suppose. :)
What a fucking arrogant asshole, "strongly advising" his superior.
The fact that the person came into a Python IRC channel and started ripping on python, by definition would not be a troll. They are argumentative, irritating, and most probably drunk... but not a troll. A Troll is secretive, hiding under a bridge, then springs out on you. I'm not sure who decided that anyone they find irritating on the internet is a Troll, but it needs to stop. Trolling is an Art-form... a very irritating, often insulting, art-form. Someone that just yells "Your favorite band sucks!" is not a troll, they're just a jerk.
Kudos to Slashdot for their moderation system, that allows trolls to be modded out of sight for most users.
Conversely, an unrepentant troll can post something insightful (by accident, no doubt) and it can be modded up to be seen by most users.
Salon.com letters section suffers from severe trollery, hence the (shameless plug follows:) Salon KillFile (http://salon.maow.net), which blocks spammers by their web site names, regardless of this week's user names. It also bans trolls by name with a single button click, and highlights a user's favourite authors with a click of a button. Finally, it also automatically highlights Salon staff letters.
Anyway, it's not as good as a moderation system, but Salon is too stupid/lazy/uncaring to bother upgrading their comment system, so users had to make their own GreaseMonkey script to do it for them.
Again, kudos to Slashdot!
http://www.bullies2buddies.com/How-to-Stop-Being-Teased-and-Bullied-Without-Really-Trying
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"Arguing on the internet is like competing in the Special Olympics. You might win, but you're retarded."
There's logic to the use of the "troll" metaphor. A rant is not trolling. Angry disagreement is not trolling. Deliberate attempts to disrupt an online forum are trolling. A responsible forum moderator has the responsibility to identify trolls and deal with them firmly, decisively, and as quickly as possible.
The most common form of trolling I have seen is a bigoted comment, often "justified" with insane troll logic. Arguing with such logic is useless, and so is trying to dissuade the commenter from bigotry.
Most importantly, the effect of such a troll is to silence or drive off members of an online community. Remember that in general, only a minority of participants in an online forum are active participants. If members of a group that has a history of victimization by bigotry see bigots going unchallenged or weakly challenged, they're likely to be discouraged from participation. Active participants will become passive, and passive participants will depart. This can kill an online community, and doing so is often a troll's intent. It is a moderator's responsibility to nurture an online community; therefore it is a moderator's responsibility to deal with trolls firmly.
A troll is not interested in having a reasoned discussion, and when offered reasonable arguments, will continue or escalate the trolling. This amplifies the effect of the trolling, and leads to a forum thread being dominated by the argument around the troll: this is the reason why the conventional advice is to refrain from feeding the troll. That's not enough, however: trolls must be eliminated.
There are two options for dealing with trolls: banning them, and humiliating them. Banning is the straightforward option, and usually the best choice, as it's the cleanest break. Humiliation is more chancy, but it has a few advantages: it makes it clear that a troll has been confronted, and in some cases, may more effectively demoralize a troll than simple banning. (One technique I've seen is "disemvowelling", in which all the vowels are deleted from a troll's comments. This makes it clear that action has been taken, and the troll's comments can be ignored, or can be puzzled out, if a regular participant wants to figure out what is going on.)
Moderation works if the moderators do NOT use moderation to push their own agenda.
Sadly as the article says, a LOT of people think provoking a debate is a bad thing. Oh dear, I might get some new info that doesn't sit well with my world view. HIDE IT!
A troll is someone who provokes for no other reason then to provoke. That doesn't mean all who provoke are trolls. Sometimes they just see the world a different way. By the logic of a lot of Slashdot moderators, Gene Roddenberry was a troll for having a white male and black woman kiss on TV. That certainly caused people to call for censorship and others that TV was not the right medium for creating a debate at this point in history.
The slashdot style moderation system, especially now since meta-moderation seems to be gone, is all to open to abuse where a bleeding heart tries to hide views he disagrees with.
It would help if the moderator had to at least specify WHY he thinks the troll is trolling and if the moderation options included choices like "don't agree with this" and more importantly "this is factually wrong as can be proven by reading these articles".
Now "troll" and "flamebait" are just translated as "do not like" and "do not want to hear this".
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I've encountered a few really annoying newsgroup trolls over the years, people that only showed up in order to stir up crap for no good reason. Those types invariably seem to think that they're anonymous because they use an assumed name and some Yahoo/AOL/Google address they acquired for that particular purpose. Although it cost me dearly in hours and eyestrain, I've hunted a couple of those people down, identified them, then posted all of the steps necessary to connect the dots back to the newsgroups they were making asses of themselves on, with information detailed enough to derive their home telephone numbers, names, place of employment, and even more sensitive personal information (in one case, if someone chose to read between the lines). In both cases, that was the end of it -- no more troll. I did this the first time after having had a discussion with a friend, who suggested that this was the best way he had found to deal with astroturfers. I believe he was right (thanks Alex). For casual trolls, I still think it is advisable to simply ignore them -- for people that are seriously asinine, a little vigilantism can be effective.
Unlike some, I have no appreciation for "the Art of Trolling". Appreciating a skillful trolling is no more worthwhile than appreciating fine sewage-making. They add essentially the same benefit to society -- in fact, the sewage might be the greater contribution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecunia_non_olet
Those aren't trolls. Those are people who disagree with you.