I hear ya, and you are right, ignoring EVERYTHING is not the solution. What I wrote can definitely be taken to an absurd extreme. Same the other way, to respond diligently to every single trolly trololo that passes through… There is a relatively calm medium, I think. Not always calm in a forum sense, but calm in a personal sense to go “pff, whatever, you idiot.” But not actually type it out and run it into the ground. YES, some idiots deserve a good boot heel now and then. I think we’ve all been that idiot, and dished to that idiot, and will again. So these things are gray not set in stone.
As far as controlling the message and the flow… I’ve been on lots of forums with lots of different discussion styles. The way a conversation goes online is AS MUCH a function of the site’s setup as it is the participants. The tech plays large. To truly control a conversation, lots of stuff must needs be deleted constantly. Which requires moderation. Which requires labor, willing labor, to be in the watchtowers and cleaning up the toxic waste spills.
So, how about a forum in which ANY participant can simply delete any other participant’s comment? Now, wouldn’t that be an interesting Milgram-esque exercise?
I can’t decide whether I like that approach or don’t. In a way, it feels like yielding territory, like surrendering to the assholes and letting them take over the internet.
On the other hand, I did this long ago with multiplayer games. I haven’t used my headset in years, don’t play anything competitive and don’t do raids or heavily group-dependent stuff in MMOs.
And I do it with news and political sites too, when I remember to. My anger and bitterness and despair aren’t going to fix the shit that’s wrong with people.
Me either, really. I’m just bloviating possibilities. It totally depends on the day. Some days people really bug the piss out of me, get my knickers all in a twist. Other days, they could insult me in the worst way and it just bounces right off me.
What kinda day is it gonna be today, punk? heheheh
I think that they key to deciding whether or not to ignore the troll is to try to gauge their intent. What is motivating the lame communications?
The situations which it helps to ignore, online and in meatspace, are those many instances where the goal is simply to provoke. Just to get a reaction from people for amusement. The internet has made it easy for somebody to be a docile passive-agressive worker and then entertain themselves by cracking open a drink and watching the riot ensue when they say “Let’s kill X!”, or “Eat babies!” or whatever. My experience is that most people who make offensive comments do so because they are immature and think it’s funny to push people’s buttons.
My next category are the large herds of people who identify with an ideology. So they proclaim their tribal allegiances by regurgitating certain things for all to hear. Usually I deal with such people by giving them some benefit of doubt, playing devil’s advocate for the sake of argument. This tends to somewhat bypass the initial us-vs-them impulse which would cause either of us to stop listening reflexively. Somebody might learn something, stranger things have happened. Often one of the best ways to show somebody the limits of their thinking is not to complain or denounce it, but to ask the right questions to lead them to the regions which demonstrate how fuzzy their thinking is. I feel some compassion for this group because they tend to just have the unfortunate conditioning of finding it more important to “fit in” with a group than to think clearly. People always start this way as children, and some grow out of it.
The toughest nut to crack are the real ideologues. These tend to be crusader types. People who have thought about whatever concerns them long enough to deeply rationalize whatever their stance is. If they are people who simply seem to hold values or convictions that I find offensive, I might talk with them, for sake of getting a window on another belief system. These are often people who can be smart or practical enough to agree to disagree. More difficult are those who desire to channel their ideology through followers - these are the dangerous ones. Often the substance of their ideology takes a back seat to the drive for followers, so questioning them is more likely to get people shouted down or harassed. Such people tend to be manipulative/sociopathic types. Arguing with them tends to be worse than useless. Better to think strategically and engage indirectly by taking note of who they are and informing people in your network.
I think you’re right… Here, there are some people who I regularly engage with, even though I disagree with them on a number of issues, and they can be off-putting at times in the way they argue. Sometimes, new accounts pop up with some non-sense, and they just get a dismissive gif.
Part of the problem (probably more so on other forums) is figuring out when to engage and when to dismiss. Sometimes, honest engagement and dialogue can get you far. I think there have been two recent stories linked about that - one with the racist trolley on Twitter and the other the TAL story with Lindy West (forgive my laziness for not linking to them…). Other times, it just gets you sucked into a debate the other person doesn’t really care about winning, other than being right and making you look bad. But sometimes, online it’s hard to suss out the difference.
There’s a deeper problem which I think goes beyond personal or group “identity” and demonstrates a problematic recursion of scientific methodology itself. Another reason why “the public refuse to believe the scientific consensus” is because of the institutionalized division between practitioners and laypeople. Science is an evidence-based discipline and does not benefit from cultivation of belief. And consensus is confined to a group of peers, so it remains amongst scientists while simply asking laypeople to believe that there is evidence interpreted by others. How this works, in essence, is that the public are paradoxically expected to take scientific consensus on faith, instead of testing it themselves, which would be an appropriately skeptical means of evaluating this consensus for themselves.
Anyone can do any of these. But since cynicism involves extreme asceticism and self-discipline, I need to disagree about it having the lowest bar, most couldn’t hack it. Properly speaking, all of these are rigorous disciplines. Clergy is probably the easiest to get away with doing poorly, since many religions require only some vague belief.
I’m a terrible person… sorry…