[tablespoon]

> Nope, she is the character that needs to be ignored. That's the proper way to deal with trolls - not feeding them, not fighting them but starving them of attention they so desperately crave.

That solution to trolling has never worked and never will. The reason is that it requires near complete agreement and coordination between uncoordinated individuals, which is impossible for any but the smallest groups. There's always someone who's too new or who doesn't want to get with the program who will engage.

[smsm42]

It doesn't require complete agreement - it does require same level of agreement and cooperation that allows us to have common language, common culture, common laws, Open Source projects, charities, etc. Just a common understanding that empowering people that thrive on tearing down and destroying others is bad for everybody, and we should not fall for any noble words they veil themselves with and see through it to the core of power lust and zeal for destruction.

Yes, there will always be those who do not abide for the societal convention for one reason or another. Cultures have dealt with this problem for millenia, it's not something new. As soon as we succeed in developing a common norm of not enabling the cancel trolls, we will have cultural mechanisms of maintaining this norm, as we maintain many other societal norms that allow us to exist as a culture and a society.

[tablespoon]

> It doesn't require complete agreement - it does require same level of agreement and cooperation that allows us to have common language, common culture, common laws, Open Source projects, charities, etc....

> Yes, there will always be those who do not abide for the societal convention for one reason or another.

I mean, as far as I can tell, the "societal convention" you're advocating for doesn't exist as such, so you lack even the minimal "some level of agreement" that your tactic requires.

[smsm42]

Yes, it does not exist yet. It needs to be created, if we don't want our society to be consumed by attention-hungry trolls. I think a lot of people - whether right-wing, left-wing or neither - are starting to realize that.

[strogonoff]

The very uncoordinated cooperation you’re talking about happens a lot in the other direction these days, and is perfectly possible in this direction as well. The problem is that “free” ad-based social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) feeds on user engagement, and the more of their users feed the troll the higher their ad revenue.

While not feeding the troll is perfectly reasonable and there’s enough people with sufficient common sense, we all are quite vulnerable to letting GUI patterns slip past our logical thinking and speak directly to system 1. The GUI is powerful in this way, and arguably it’s never really neutral. In case of “free” social media, it promotes action, it makes the “like” action the most effortless, it feeds likes into recommendations, and so on. Not feeding the troll goes against everything it stands for.

I’ll probably never shut up about it, but I believe making social media paid rather than ad-driven is what has the power to address this issue in the most reasonable way. Paid social media should be normalized.