[problems]

You're as much a victim here as someone who downloads a tiny executable off a filesharing network and thinks it's the latest movie or game. Or falls for a Nigerian scam. These are accepted facts of the internet. We defend against them. Just as much as publishing your address or information which can be associated to it should be.

Precautions are important. You can never rid the world of evil, but you can protect yourself from it, especially trivially in this case.

[sp332]

We made Nigerian scams illegal. We defend against them partly by prosecuting them. We work hard to reduce the frequency and the impact of them. But you're not saying that we should do any of that for trolls. I don't accept that trolling is just something that necessarily happens and that we need to accept. We can hold trolls accountable and work to reduce trolling overall.

[problems]

> We made Nigerian scams illegal. We defend against them partly by prosecuting them. We work hard to reduce the frequency and the impact of them.

And guess what? They still happen. We already have the laws to attack the kind of "troll" that shows up at your door in many cases - but guess what? It still happens. Ultimately the law only gets you so far. So we must defend against them in more effective ways - like individual knowledge.

It's a lot easier and more effective to guarantee safety with online matters when you behave safely online than when you start taking risks and expect the law, the website or whatever else to deal with the consequences. That's just wishfully naive thinking.

Yes, in an absolute sense, all harm should be blamed on the abuser, I don't mean to suggest otherwise. But the prevention potential is so much higher if you can attack it at it's destination than at its source - like using a firewall on your server instead of just saying "hacking is illegal, therefore no one will hack me".

[ryandrake]

I tell my kid not to run in the street for a reason. On the Internet, you can run in the street all day, and if someone hits you, it's not your fault because "victim blaming is wrong".

[problems]

Yeah, its one thing to say victim blaming about something that's difficult or expensive (monetarily, freedom or time) - it's quite another to use it to discourage individual defense.

[dredmorbius]

There are people who simply cannot effectively defend themselves.

They don't have the knowledge. They're visually disabled. They've got cognitive decline, for whatever reasons.

And the scams and attacks keep coming.

Generally not trolls, so much, though that can be a thing as well.

I'm not completely against there being some wild corners of the Internet (though you might want to take a look at some of danah boyd's recent writing on 4chan and /b/, and what grew from them, and why, and how), but there's a rather large part of it that really has no business being like that.

People get hurt. Money and life savings are lost.

Not everyone's a street-wise, healthy and hale 24 year old.

[mirimir]

Then you buffer them. You limit input and output to trusted family, friends and support staff.

[dredmorbius]

Try that some time and tell me how it goes.

[mirimir]

Yeah, I get that.

But damn, if you could later change permissions, and then they would forget, that would reduce your risk. It could get confusing, however.