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There is something tangential that I have always found interesting. Whenever this kind of discussion (about this-better-site users vs. that-worse-site users, subjective judgments galore, obviously) happens, there are always posts about the "strategically correct" behavior to ensure the desired outcome. The prototypical case would be: "Don't feed the trolls." But, in posting this publicly, on a social site where, in many cases, the troll is targeting said social site, you are feeding the troll. In fact, the troll's goal might simply be to elicit as many "don't feed the troll" posts as possible. Stated otherwise, reiterating the rule to ignore somebody is effectively un-ignoring them. But at the same time, you want to reinforce these rules into the community, and educate people to follow them. So you have a problem: in order for the rule to be efficient, it needs to be tacit; but it also needs to be widely known, and the efficient way to achieve this is by reiterating it publicly. Now, there is clearly a puzzle here. Has anyone else thought about this, and came to an elegant attack? I think the most obvious case is to use private messages, although I have no knowledge how well those work (this is a general case and is independent of whether HN has PMs or not). |