I don’t feel a need for dislikes. As noted, the few cases which really call for it can already be Flagged.
I do want “don’t show me posts by this person”, equivalent to killfiles in newsgroup readers. Even when not deliberate trolls, sometimes there are people whom I really don’t want to or shouldn’t hear from directly because I’m going to have trouble not flaming in response. Better for everyone if that temptation is removed. And of course, if it’s a true troll, everyone killfiles them and they wind up being ignored – which is the single best way to make a troll go away; it’s no fun for them unless they get a response.
Well, this is why I brought up disemvowelling in the other meta. I don’t think Maple or Marilove or Millie are trolls, if those are the people we’re talking about. Are we? Never mind, doesn’t matter.
Personally I try to treat people at least as well as they treat me, and people tend to pick up on that pretty quick, and avoid poking me with a stick after the first go-round or two. And if somebody presses one of my buttons, and I overreact, (hey, it happens, I’m not really a brain in a vat!) I’ll apologize. Well, unless I’m convinced the person who got flamed is really a total waste of skin. Is it actually possible to enforce civil discourse without authoritarian actions like user ostracism or post deletion? I honestly don’t know, but it’s good that people are thinking about it.
I just want to throw out a couple things that I’ve seen implemented on another site. I rarely comment on Fark, but I often read through the comments on there. Fark’s comment system is actually somewhat similar to Boing Boing’s but the users are quite different. Fark’s users are pretty much encouraged to troll each other. The comments there are moderated, but mostly to keep nudity out of them (please take a moment to mourn the loss of Boobies threads).
They also have two features that make reading through their giant threads a lot easier. You can block individual users and you can highlight individual users. Both features work well on Fark. I’m not sure how well they’d work on Boing Boing. Highlighting might work, but my main use for it on Fark is for skimming through large threads. Boing Boing threads generally don’t get that large and I suspect that skimming through the comments isn’t behaviour that you want to encourage. It could still be useful to help someone pick which topics to read first though. If a topic has a comment by one of your favourite commenters, you might prefer to read that first.
Now blocking users is very useful on Fark. The shithead to insightful commenter ratio on Fark is way worse than here. I’m not sure if a block list is the way to go here, but if it is, take a look at how they did it there. You can ignore a user and their actual comment isn’t shown to you, but you still see the header of the comment with the reason you ignored them. You can also easily unblock someone.
For reference, I have 80 users favourited and 21 users blocked there. I also suspect that most (but not all) of the comments that caused me to block those users on Fark would be flagged out of existence here.
Slashdot has a similar system, where you can designate “friends” and “foes” and assign karma modifiers to them. (Fark’s actually sounds a bit better to me but I haven’t used it.) Everybody can tell who your friends and foes are, but they can’t see what your modifiers are, so the amusing thing is you can reverse the roles, giving positive modifiers to foes and negative to friends, and then tag people you don’t want to hear from as friends and people who have opinions you want to hear as foes. Confuses the hell out of people and is mildly amusing in practice.
This conversation takes me back to the days of NNTP over UUCP and killfiles.
Eh, I think we need something. Even if it just ends up being an unendorsed browser extension. Some folks are wont to post things akin to “adam and eve not adam and steve” arguments that I don’t feel rise to the occasion of being flaggable. So, I’m left either flagging when I think doing so is overboard, responding in kind, or finding some kind of killfile style solution.
I’m not sure what’s so bad about downvoting anyway. It’s negative but not inherently more so than stop signs or reasonable speed limits.
There are __ posts in this topic. That’s a lot! Would you like to save time by showing only the best posts?
I have not really wanted to block any regular posters, but I have wanted to block some of the “Created at: 2 hours” people who seem to be here only to trolley.
Well, new users (and this isn’t based on wall clock time but number of things they’ve read – you could conceivably be a new user for months, depending on your patterns) are indicated by a grey username for this very reason.
Nothing winds me up more than the “well, I just got here, and let me tell all’a ya’ll just how wrong you are about everything” guy. And it is always a guy.
This happens in meatspace a lot when new people join the school PTA, the local Chamber of Commerce, the board of the church, the trustees of the golf course, etc. etc. etc. and to be fair, I have been present when “that guy” was female. In fact at the PTA it’s almost always a woman (and lately the topic is nearly always how she thinks the school should be hermetically sealed and video monitored at all times, despite crime in the community being far less common than in her own childhood).
And you know, they are just trying their honest best to enlighten you poor benighted heathens… sometimes, if you can hold off murdering them long enough, they end up viable members of the organization.
I’ve been reading BoingBoing for quite awhile and participating in the comments for about six months longer than BBS has been in place and I still don’t feel comfortable guestimating how much is too much flame wise around here.
Meanwhile, the shitlord who reminded me why I support Dislike buttons … I have a feeling it would just encourage them. I need a burn that would make them retire from the internet and make their mothers regret giving birth. Or, absent that, some way of not seeing their shit. lol
The piñata point reminds me: I also want “kill thread”. Once folks veer off in that direction, the discussion is usually dead, whether or not Godwin rears its ugly little head.
Yes, I can manually skip it. But (a) that’s what machines are for and (b) as noted above, sometimes it’s better if we can just remove the temptation from our screens.
I’m not asking for “ignore topic”. I’m asking for “ignore this answer to this topic, and every answer which references it directly or indirectly.” In other words, I’m still grumbling that we lost true threaded discussion and I want something like it restored.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I’ve checked out that thread and can remember other similar ones and I have two caveats with this particular example:
This long-time poster is very emotional/passionate/triggered in general, so this is not a case of trolling per se;
This poster does get some likes in every thread, although not for every post of course.
Seems to me this is a perfect example of when “ignore poster” on an individual basis would be the better solution than a mod stepping in.
However, I agree that having a thread-level warning (“you’ve posted too much in this thread…step away from the keyboard”) in addition to the current too-many-posts-in-a-row warning could be useful. But maybe not absolute: there are times when a thread becomes a beneficial and interesting discussion between two or three people who clearly know what they’re talking about. We wouldn’t want to dissuade that from happening.
Doesn’t matter. If you are “emotional” and “only” punch people in the face once every 3 months, that is just as unacceptable as if you punched people in the face every day.
The only thing we want to dissuade from happening is personal attacks, and other forms of incivility. See: http://boingboing.net/community
