Don't feed the troll...

[Ian Kelly]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 1:46 PM, Antoon Pardon
<antoon.pardon at rece.vub.ac.be> wrote:
> But you didn't even go to the trouble of trying to find out
> what those concerns would be and how strong people feel about
> them. You just took your assumptions about those concerns for
> granted and proceeded from there.

Jumping back in here, I for one don't give a hoot about their
concerns, beyond the basic assumption that they feel the same way I do
about Nikos' threads and wish that he would leave.  I just want to
maintain a positive and welcoming atmosphere around here.  I expect
that most of the posters here are adults and can fend for themselves
regarding their own concerns, and I'm not interested in being the list
mom.  You on the other hand seem to want to treat the list like a
playground.  If that's what you want to do, then by all means go for
it; just leave me out of it.

>> If you need some sort of public "show", then I will publicly
>> state that I too have been very frustrated with many of
>> Nikos' posts and I am greatly sympathetic to the desire to
>> tell the SOB to go take a flying fuck.  That not withstanding
>> I believe that responding that way does not help anything
>> and is destructive.
>
>
> You really should learn the difference between telling and showing.

Copy...

> Why should I care about the rational you gave. It is based on
> your own assumptions, on how you weight the possible outcomes against
> each other. Someone who doesn't care about trolls or even may
> enjoy observing a heated exchange may come to an entirely different
> conclusion on what behaviour is good for the group in case he
> extrapolated his own preferences on the group.
>
> And you may not have purposely made things up to justify your
> proposal, but how you went about it, that is probably what you
> actually did. Because that is what we as humans generally do
> in this kind of situations.

"Made things up"?  This response to the situation is not just our own
assumptions at work, but the collective experience of the Internet,
going back decades.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Don%27t_feed_the_Troll

> Now as far as I am concerned you can be as blunt as you want to
> be. I just don't understand why you think you should be so
> careful to Nikos, while at the same time you saw no need for
> careful wording here.

Nobody is suggesting that we should make any effort to try to avoid
hurting Nikos' feelings, contrary to what you seem to be implying
here.  Be as blunt as you want with him, but please recognize that
troll baiting /does not work/ as a means of making the troll go away
and only serves to further degrade the list.

Nor do I think that it is a bad thing to be blunt about it with those
who are dampening the environment.  As I said above, the posters here
are mostly adults, most of whom I think are not so emotionally fragile
that they would wilt because of a simple reprimand on the Internet (or
if they really /can't/ take it, then perhaps they should have thought
about that before they started dishing it).

> Your argument is next to useless. You rarely make people change behaviour by
> showing your argument is correct. If your goal is influencing people into
> behaving more as you would like, focussing
> on your argument instead of empathising on their frustration is
> more likely to antagonise the people whose behaviour you would
> like to change than to get them to cooperate.

...paste.

"You really should learn the difference between telling and showing."

>> Second, I *am* concerned in that I find a lot of Nikos's responses
>> frustrating and I realize other people feel the same.
>
> Stop telling you are concerned. Start showing.

How?  By joining in with the flaming and being just as
counter-productive?  I'm not going to try to "show" my concern because
it is not important to me whether others can see it.

>> But that
>> does not mean that giving into emotion and filling this group
>> up with all sort of negative hostile hate-mail is the right thing
>> to do.  Silence is a better option overall (IMO).  There are three
>> decades of internet experience that agree.
>
> Do you have mumbers on that? Otherwise those three decades of internet
> don't mean much.

The only actual study on the topic that I'm aware of is this one:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jun/13/internet-trolls-improbable-research