Have you ever gone up to a musician and told them to play something else less crappy? How did that go for you? How about when you asked to hear something you liked, instead?
Same goal, different approaches. If you can’t ask for the latter, you should consider what gives you title to say the former!
Wetware solutions as I see it.
No, it has honestly never occurred to me to try doing either! Because music and body language lack any semantic component, I just need to trust them to realize it as they see fit. But I do try to more actively engage with people in language because the semantic layer is there where meanings can be defined and agreed upon, references can be specified, and such.
I know that this distinction may be largely an artefact of my own reasoning, or at least can’t be assumed as universal.
It all becomes Usenet eventually…
Though I guess these days it all becomes Reddit… or something something. 
Except anyone can start a Discourse instance for relatively small financial outlay (a VPS and some technical knowhow, less cost than you likely pay for internet access) so your supposition doesn’t hold. “Businesses” aren’t restricting access to forums, and Jeff and his team have worked hard to create an Open Source tool to help facilitate these discussions for anyone who’d like to use them.
trollies aside, one presumes posters come to the BBS because they enjoy BB, and it appears BB attracts some pretty awesome folks. 
Before my time, so not at all. However, I thought the problems were more spam/porn related than trolls and harassment.
I agree that there is no a problem of software or access, as such. That’s not what I was supposing. I was referring to the overall trends of online discourse over the past two decades or so. There has been a drastic concentration of both ISPs and online spaces, and I think that the normalization of that asymmetry has been part of the trolley phenomenon generally.
Of course, whether or not one agrees to the TOS of a given currency for paying an ISP or VPS might be another matter.
I think I’ve said this on other comments, but much of my current research involves gender and negotiation, particularly in heavily female-dominated fields, such as my own, librarianship. The “win-win” approach has been lauded for years in seminal negotiation texts such as “Getting to Yes” et al. Constructive discourse in any comments section is not so different from productive negotiation. It’s a give and take wherein each side respects the motivations of the other without devolving into logical fallacy. It’s an opportunity for both sides to “win” through transformation and compromise.
Otherwise, we’re all just throwing crap-filled “fuck you’s” at each other.
That was much later. Mid-period Usenet, especially the alt newsgroups, were filled with socially awkward engineers and geeks, usually white and male… So it looked pretty much like the population of 4chan in some ways. There was a lot of trollish behavior and no one to moderate anyone by force so folks largely had to do it socially for any given newsgroup. On many, it worked out (or self-selected to appear that way) but, looking back, I think it was probably kind of a wash.
Later on, after Usenet mostly died, people used it as a way to distribute binaries or porn as a huge thing. In the late 80s and early to mid 1990s, there was a lot more discussion. I ran a dial up BBS that was one of the few public nodes in my area with a selection of Usenet groups (around 1989 or 1990), even had a UUCP address for email. This was about two or three years before ISPs became a thing that people could pay to access (and my net provider for my feeds eventually became one of the first Seattle area ISPs). That tended to limit the kind of folks you ran into online.
Damn, now I gotta get out my cane and walker.
Makes sense, so the only real, tangible difference is the volume of users.
You’re better at explaining it than I am. Thank you.
Can you provide an example of this? Have you ever seen it happen here on BBS?
Why so defensive? Seems like Jilly was speaking from her own experience.
I wasn’t being defensive. Sorry if it was interpreted that way, was not intended, I had literally 0% defensiveness in mind when I wrote that.
Examples are good, that’s my only point. I just don’t know what any of those words actually mean without seeing an example, ideally a BBS example?
The definition of “troll” seems to have merged the original fishing-related one — advancing insincere opinions in order to stir shit up — and the more recent monster-related one of just being a complete asshole lacking in any self-awareness. I think reëstablishing the differentiation might be useful; otherwise the monster trolls can always retreat behind “I’m just trying to stimulate conversation” or whatever when called out on their shit.
It’s pretty much how the old (mostly antinous, some TNH) mods brought me into the stable. And while I meant that word in the ‘barn’ sense, I’ll leave it there for it’s second meaning of ‘evenhanded’ in the conversational sense. My first few months here I was the wurst and treated online interactions very very selfishly.
I could name a few current regulars whom I think are on a similar path. It’s not always an instant thing. But, I will keep my eyes open for current examples of this to douse your doubt (is it cynicism?). I often come around in conversation, mostly because I learned that being incorrect is a circumstance, and being wrong is a choice.
thing is, once you get certain habits off the table (speaking for others, baldly misrepresenting facts, ad hominem, etc…) even the monsters are suddenly pedestrian. Policing behavior is the only way to go IMO.
Provocative ideas > provocative behavior.
Hot gas expansion.
Male-skewing boards suffer an interesting phenomena, in which two equally vehement and opposed views result in a synthesis through shit-slinging, insults, and linking to evidence. Fur ball.
I mean, don’t feed the trolls, right?
More seriously though, my tactic to limit interaction with trolling (and to cut out unintentional trolling on my own account) was to let myself get all the way to the end of a comment/reply/whatever and then delete the whole thing. I did this free-for-all, so that things like rightness or hunger for the last word didn’t influence deletion.
Eventually I just stopped engaging with trolls, but even better, adopted the same tic with general, positive discussion, although there’s more nuance and filtration involved. Just like, not everything you think needs to be said aloud, right?
Literally, just deleted a paragraph right here. For no reason. Editing is cool.
