• CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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    4 months ago

    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.

    • daltotron@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.