Interesting thought. Don’t block the troll, block their “food”. And perhaps let replies be made but only visible to the person who accidently fed the troll.
I don’t think winnowing out the discourse helps with trolls. It seems to me that they count upon silencing discussions by means of shock tactics. It can be tempting to snap into an emotional reaction, but not unlike dealing with a histrionic toddler, I think it’s ultimately more productive to maintain the calm voice of reason. They might not learn from the exchange today or tomorrow, but they might eventually. And at least you tried. The BS only becomes toxic when people take it to heart.
Fair enough. I was thinking about swear words in general, but your point is valid.
However, let us understand how human beings work. The more we see the expression, the more it will be used by others, regardless of disapproval.
It’s just like children’s shows that show bad behavior throughout the show and then show it punished or regretted at the end. The majority of children end up emulating the bad behavior because what gets through is the amount of screen time of each behavior, not the “moral” in the last few minutes. Adults are only slightly more immune to this.
Heh, I haven’t looked at anything Gamegate in a while since except for the occasional article on BB I don’t see anything of it.
But months have passed & my then-future definition of GamerGate still holds true. Sounds like it will continue to be naught but a tag that loser scum willingly wears on itself to help the rest of us identify them. So. Very. Useful.
Thanks Baldwins, et al! You so helpful all the time!
disclaimer for slur: No one at all requires/forces these people to remain loser scum
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That seems right on the money. Although punks used swastikas (especially British punks), and only a few of those turned out to be actually neo-nazis (Skrewdriver). But in that case, it would have been shocking to their parents… and most of them stopped doing it when actually neo-nazis showed up at their gigs…
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Because they know that most people who might otherwise align with them would immediately turn their backs if they came out as openly fascist. They see how people who embrace the whole Nazi ideology have been marginalized (William Pierce, for one). They want a share of the power, so they avoid out right nazi ideology, even though that’s what they really believe. It is hard to ignore the millions slaughtered in the second world war. We’ve all seen the footage, probably had a high school or college class where a survivor came and spoke about their experiences. They see it as zionist propaganda, but as long as there is sympathy for the victims of the holocaust and the nazi death machine they just can’t come out and say what they are.
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Except on certain sites:
link https://www.anonimg.com/img/c5bc75d9d913da27d6ce4c2f6b805bcb.jpeg
On other sites, they have to hide it, although they aren’t always able to hide it.
For example, there’s one troll on the Guardian who keeps claiming that black people are secretly hoping for, in his words, a race war.
At the same time, there’re other trolls who hector survivors of abuse to explain exactly what happened, what we were doing to deserve it, and whether we reported it to the police department, especially when it was at the hands of the police department.
All this does undermine any kind of conversation.
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I don’t know what it says about me (and the chan) that I was most astonished by the fact that the OP knew which “its” to use bigotedly.
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Can you define your terms more clearly? I don’t understand what the word "I’ means outside the context of a self, or what “not interested in” means outside the context of a personality.
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Isn’t this just an example of the generalized phenomenon of internet vigilantism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_vigilantism Do we really need a separate theory of “chan culture” to explain what has gone on here when a more generalized generic theory explains it already?
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I’d like to say I was flabbergasted by that when I saw it.
Sadly, I wasn’t.
So. Much. Evil. Vitriol.
I think one saving grace (from my limited experience of this kind of douchecanoery) is that most of these keyboard cowboys seldom have the intestinal fortitude to act like this in meat space.
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Except these people are not targetting “wrong doers”.
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Technically, they are:
- Define what “is” “wrong”.
- Target the “wrongdoers”.
People get all self-righteous and the same kind of mob psychology that helps people excuse and even tacitly endorse lynching, looting, arson, and overall demonization and dehumanization of the target of the crowd’s rage operates online and pulls in lots of otherwise ordinary people who “like” a Facebook post about the outrage of the day or tweet about their outrage over something someone else tweeted. Ordinary nice people become vicious when they see something on social media that upsets them.
http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-12-26/news/57420324_1_outrage-mob-sadism
It still tends to get quite more attention than the more technical issues. Cf. the discussion activity on NSA-related items and GG-related (or, generally, technical vs social) ones.
Bonus points for analysis stuff, though.
As of a specific pair of examples to illustrate my grumbliness, compare the level of discussion activity about the Rebel Alliance vs Empire thing with the discussion activity at the Guyana village homemade drones and their use for detection of illegal logging. And compare the actual possible impact of either; one a heated, too emotional at places, but rather impactless discussion, one a cheap and replicable technology with asymmetric impact on the dynamics between the locals and the ecosystem-harvesting invaders but generating rather low interest. Thank you, gang, for including that one (and others that attract undeservedly low attention), though.
Of course it is nothing I can do anything about, and is not isolated to this place. Probably it is an effect of people being people. And of me being stuck on a wrong planet.
But then…
I kvetch, therefore I am.
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Many thousands of people follow the Boing Boing BBS, too. AFAIK none of them have publicly identified as fascists. Which would suggest, at least, that while both groups may harbor fascists, channers harbor more openly fascist fascists. Does that mean a higher percentage of fascists (the portion of the iceberg that is visible), the same percentage but with a higher comfort level in public acknowledgement, or something else?
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Oh, wow, I’m picturing an amazing alternate history from that…
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Actually I wonder how true that is. Sometimes they look like people who are only marginally functioning in society and have just enough self-awareness to realize that the only place where their behavior doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb is the virtual monkey cage.
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That’s partially because a substantial portion of the abuse comes from 12-16 year-olds who are more or less ‘experimenting’ with psychotic behavior in a fashion where it won’t have consequences (for them). Oddly enough, the majority mature to eventually become decent human beings.
The unfortunate side of the internet is that it allows us direct interaction with these young people, and affords them a more or less risk-less platform that encourages such ‘experimentation’. The Internet is absolutely a force-multiplier for adolescent madness.
It doesn’t make the damage they do any less real, but I’m not sure how to handle it. Arming children with the Internet and not expect some significant proportion (5-10%) to use it psychotically is like arming children with handguns and not expect a ton of school shootings.
But do we deprive all the others who can handle the freedom of the Internet it in order to protect ourselves?
No good answer.
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