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by ativzzz 2181 days ago
> The phrase "don't feed the trolls" is well-intentioned but it's difficult to scale the message when so many people are online and can witness and partake in minor and major conversations alike.

I wonder if it's possible to have a community where the moderation is more focused on educating people to identify trolling and discourage posters from engaging with emotionally charged/inciting posters. Instead of warning the troller, encourage people to just downvote and move on instead of engaging.

I consider a troll as someone who is seeking to create a strong negative (anger, hate, frustration, etc) emotion in a reader intentionally or unintentionally. I dont know if this is too subjective and impossible to enforce.

1 comments

Hacker news has excellent moderation, and high standards for comments. Relax them a bit to allow for memes and harmless troll threads like Rick rolls while strictly moderating against those participating in bad faith. Mind you, moderation needn't be by paid or even volunteer moderators. There are various solutions axiall available and the most successful are always multifaceted in their approaches.