Trolls, or trolling behaviour ...how do we deal with these isues as an online community?

Apparently you missed the part where she was tracked down to another web site, Christian oriented, in which she was urging those members to come here to overwhelm the opposition. (Some of them did, but didn't stay long; they all had underestimated the number of people with whom they'd be dealing.)

I guess you also missed the part where your Miss Sweetness and Light lied about doing that--leading one of our members (whom i won't name without explicit consent) to track her down at that other site. I guess you also missed the part in which she started a thread in which she lied about a personal emergency, in the hope of garnering sympathy--specifically in that she based it on an old post of mine in which i had originally described a personal emergency of my own, which she was copying.

I guess you only saw those aspects of Miss Sweetness and Light which appealed to an admiration upon which you were determined.

Her bullshit didn't drive me crazy. Every time she posted her idiotic "smilies," i told how idiotic they made her look. Everytime she posted her hypocritical, right-wing politico-religious bullshit, i told her it was bullshit and that she was a hypocrite. Everytime she posted that god bless our troops self-serving snake oil, i posted Samuel Clemens' The War Prayer. I assure you, far from driving me crazy, she afforded me great entertainment.

You have a very selective memory.

Mostly irrelevant, Set. As I said, you and I agree substantively most of the time, and I disagreed with her most of the time, but when your buttons are pushed you react out of all proportion, to the point where your actions often are so unlikeable that I have questioned why I agree with you on substantive points. Watching her push your buttons with the smilies, and seeing the increasing amounts of steam coming out of your ears while she remaineded unflappable as the interchange went on, became really amusing. Your viewpoint of what went on, believe me, does not match what it looked like from outside. (You're not alone, of course, in the utter loss of cool. Ionus and JTT spring to mind).

I too remember mama angel as pretty much a fruitcake.

oh, she was definitely a fruitcake, but not a nasty one.

I think wandeljw made an excellent point in that this kind of behavior is often in the eye of the beholder. This means for the most part members here have to deal with it themselves, there is never going to be a consensus on just how to herd the cats and like dlowan said, "ain't nothing gonna make a cat easy to herd!" To recognize this able2know is not going to get more involved in a top-down taking out of the "trash" as folks like Bill and dlowan have advocated. One man's meat is another man's poison and we just aren't going to moderate this site through online lynchings where people get fed up enough with someone to start advocating that the site administration take care of it. We are all grownups here and while we still do suspend members for certain levels of disruption there will always be friction in a group this large and we can't arbitrate it all.

So it's usually easier to change your own behavior than trying to change the community, or the "trolls" behavior. With that in mind many here have made the obvious suggestion of ignoring the users who bother you. Just like in the brick-and-mortar world you can't always make someone who is obnoxious stop being obnoxious and sometimes the clear solution is to cease to interact with them. Your choices basically boil down to: tolerate their annoyance, avoid them, confront them about their behavior or appeal to others to help you with your annoyance (pals asked to ostracize, authority asked to censor).

And those are essentially the choices we have here and it falls on us to decide how to best employ the tools we have toward the choices that make the most sense to us.

From a personal standpoint, I just avoid interactions that I don't enjoy as much as I am able to. Of course that often means I will reach a point where I don't enjoy something but that's the predictable consequence of fellowship: friction.

From a community building standpoint I think there is still a lot left we can do to improve on things. Technology hugely influences community culture and we have some glaring deficiencies when it comes to truly empowering the user to control their own experience. Those who chose to ignore a user may find that the user still greatly influences their discussions because of others who don't or because pages of the linear discussion are filled with the disruptive behavior and others give up on pursuing the thread further.

In short, the calls to avoid interactions that annoy you make sense however there is a very compelling case to be made to the effect that the tools to do so here are not adequate to this need. Ignoring someone here doesn't necessarily save your thread, it may just mean you don't see them but that doesn't unfuck your thread.

I've been thinking about this and other related community culture issues for a few months now, and unsurprisingly I have a couple of ideas and opinions about this:

1) The most effective tool is not technological but is social. No matter what technology the site builds or policy it lays down the ultimate responsibility of anyone's happiness rests with them. Nothing can help your experience here more than you.

And in a similar vein, nothing can help our collective community culture more than our social behavior and what we as a group accept as our cultural standards. This is why I make a point of speaking out about things when I'd rather just ignore them and move on. In the past community culture was dictated to a greater degree, but now you and I have about as much say in these matters and the community needs to step forward more often and not wait for authority to handle something.

Leadership here on able2know isn't about someone having been picked by a cabal to lead, it is democratic in nature (hawkeye will call it popularity, but though democracy hasand means stepping up and taking matters into your own hands. This thread is such an example of what I am talking about. It represents leadership towards appealing to the community about it's culture. And I see more and more people doing it. They are speaking out about behavior they disagree with more often, and are voting and ignoring more and more.

So I appeal again to the community to be active in establishing community culture. Don't leave it up to those who troll for attention to define your community.

2) We need to find ways to allow different cultural pockets to establish themselves in able2know. As we grow it is simply a taller and taller task to ask us to share the same conference room. We can't always be a cozy house, but instead of saying it's this way or the highway we need to evolve into a vibrant town that supports different houses with different house rules. In such a town there is community but also smaller enclaves of different cultures.

Right now, there is a lot of conflict between cultures here on a2k and I'd like to go over the many different ideas that have been percolating about how to promote this cultural melting pot on a2k (note: these are ideas that may be discarded for flaws discovered after a few more months of thinking, so this is all theoretical at this stage).

a) Groups: ok this one's not theoretical, it is a big priority. We need to allow this community to establish it's own groups. Sometimes it will be just to get out of the way of the rest of the community (e.g. the crossword crowd might prefer their own enclave for it), other times it will be to enable certain kinds of one-sided/like-minded discussion we currently don't support very well (e.g. someone seeking religious fellowship won't find it here on the general boards without a dose of insults), some groups would be used for privacy, for members to discuss things they are only comfortable discussing with a smaller audience (e.g. a group who wants to discuss very personal things), and there will be other times still where someone just wants a troll-free enclave as they see it.

The bottom line here is that groups will have their culture defined by their founders and administrators, and if you disagree with the thresholds of culture on the general boards you will have the opportunity to create your own culture or find one that is already established to your liking.

This is something that is a big priority for us, especially with future forum imports where some niches might better be served imported as their own segmented groups. In the brick-and-mortar world you don't have to leave town when the village idiot is getting on your nerves, you can just head to another coffee shop that doesn't let that particular idiot in. We will make such structures for able2know and will be a stronger community for it.

b) We are considering putting more control of threads in the author's hands (such as the ability to block users from participating) and essentially make them moderators of their own topics.

This is fraught with downsides, however, as there will obviously be some kinds of abuse of the authority and the specifics of implementation can make or break this (e.g. maybe they shouldn't be able to block the user but just collapse the posts while others can still open them if they choose).

c) We are considering more ways users can filter out what they don't want to see in general. For example, the ability to filter out tags (so you can stop downvoting the poor crossword crowd). We will look for more ways for you to separate your wheat from your chaff. Other example would be the option to ignore responses to those you ignore, the option to not just collapse an ignored users' posts but to not display them at all to you.

d) Alternate topic views. With a linear topic disruption occupies a place in the middle of everyone's way. With threaded discussion disruptions are forks in the road that you can elect not to take. This is not without significant usability issues though, and we are going to have to think this one over long and hard before trying it (and if we can't nail it we won't implement it).

e) Optional filters. We already plan to create a bad word filter that would be enabled for guests and optional for users, but this concept can be extended to collaborative user filtering. For example, if you don't like our limited use of user suspensions you could subscribe to an ignore list of someone who you think runs a tighter ship. Essentially what this means is that while we only suspend egregious disruptors on a2k you may want a stricter list and we may make the tools for users to collaborate on their own optional lists of ignored users.

There are many other such ideas we consider and will work on to improve the ability of this community to sustain diverse, and sometimes diametrically opposed, members. And now to head off the hawkeye popularity rant:

Hawkeye, you can deride this as "popularity" and groupthink but you offer no alternative to democracy but a dictatorship of your ideas. These changes might make it easier for some folks to ignore people that annoy them but they are built in order to allow the annoying folk to stay just as much as for the folk who are annoyed to eliminate the annoyance.

In short, these tools you incessantly deride are what allow us to resist calls to take action against deeply unpopular members. We give the members the tools to define their own experiences so that we aren't the only tool.

When the only tool you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail, all these issues only have censorship and banning as the solution in most forums. The "popularity" metrics you rant about are what allow us to give unpopular folk their voice here and have more to do with folk who disrupt the forum though flooding, intentional trolling etc than folks who are just deeply unpopular or who hold deeply unpopular opinions. These tools are aimed at building individualized and democratized ways for the community to manage their conflicting concerns. These tools aren't silencing you at all here, they are enabling you to have your say.

But there is a limit to everyone's right to have their say here. One man's rights end where the other man's right to peaceful coexistence begins. In order to shun censorship as much as we can on a2k, we must allow users to censor within the context of their own experience. They have the right not to be held hostage to someone else's free speech as well.

Kind of sorry to see 2) a be a priority. Yeah, I can recall being part of one of those groups, and briefly being the group leader. Still, it is going to siphon off lots of good discussions. I don't recall if I had that thought at the time, but. . . . I might appreciate a crossword puzzle group, but that is as far as I would willingly go, in that direction.

Letting a thread author collapse a post or poster probably wouldn't hurt anything, but I also doubt it would be helpful.

I recognize I might be more resistant to change than most people.

I do like the present system of ALL kinds of topics showing up in the New Topics and New Posts, whether I'm interested in them or not, bcause at least that way I can choose to interact or not. I kind of don't like certain ones being beneath viewing threshhold, becaus if it's not there my eye just sort of automatically skips over that line (kind of like it does over the ads) and then I never know whether it's there or not or whether I'd be interested. Maybe offer two options: All Topics, and something like Voter Approved Topics (or some similar less biased name).

And I like the crossword threads, even tho I don't have the actual puzzles since I don't live in Australia. I even read the water softener threads, even if only to marvel at the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde sides of H2OMan, depending on where he was posting.

MontereyJ, you can select to NOT have a viewing threshold in your Preferences. I don't have a viewing threshold, so no one else's votes but my own affect my seeing threads. It's under Enable Topic Filter... and Enable Post Filter.

You're almost there already now that we can follow anyone's posts and filter what we see of their posts.

To make it useful for establishing our own groups, let us apply "tags" to the people in our "following" lists so that we can filter the posts in the My Friends tab based on the "tag/filter" we've defined and selected. i.e., if I want to see what my A2K friends on Facebook are up to, I just click on the A2K tag I established to see just their wall posts. If I want to read what my media or political friends are saying, I can filter out everything but their posts.

That's how I handle it now on Facebook. I tagged various groups of friends and can selectively filter the viewing of all their posts based on what group's tag I select for viewing.

Applications such as games also have this type of filter built in. Each application is assigned an app number and we can filter the posts of all players of just that particular application by saving the link to that app number's posts in my browser's favorites list. I have about 25 application filters set up this way.

Here's an example of how we could use such a tool here. Let's say I've got 50 people I'm following. I'd probably want to apply the tag "cooking" to some of them, others I'd tag with "decorating" while I'd tag others with "health care" or "earthquakes" or "Droid" or "games." When I click on the My Friends tab, let it display a selection menu of those tag categories I've applied to the ones I'm following. If I want to selectively view the posts in a certain category, say "Droids," I can do so using that filter you've already created for the people I follow. If I'm participating in a contentious health care topic, I can befriend/follow those I wish to debate with and selectively view only their posts in the debate. If someone turns disruptive, it is as simple as removing the filter tag I applied to them for that particular category.

I'd also hate to see us fractionating into groups,as it sounds like the hamsters may be contemplating. I like the free-for-all discussions. If it's something concrete, someone is bound to come up with a solution or something to try pretty quickly, and that's good. If it's more opinion, or susceptible to a variety of approaches, a2k really reminds me of the really good bull sessions I was in in my 20s. People jump in, opinions are expressed, someone presents something different and interesting or provocative, and people go off on that tangent for awhile and then circle back around, or get really involved in that and just run with it for a few days. Some people specialize in puncturing hypocrisy or cant or pretentiousness with one well0pointed barb (you guys who do this know who you are). They're a lot like real life, and I'd hate to see those only open to some people the originator approves of, or not even postedfor all of us to see.

I am going to start putting people on "Ignore" who use "it's" for the possessive.

osso, where are "enable topic filter" and "enable post filter"?

Oh, nooooooo..
In my case, it's was in place of it is..

Aha, I see a guilty person needs no accuser, it wasn't my it's you didn't like.

(it's not you, osso)

I agree, that is my preference too, but I think Robert is talking about giving us and the growing a2k membership choices.

At the bottom of the page - the dark blue area - are a bunch of pages to click on, one being My Preferences...

I am all for democracy, but it is not helpful in arriving at the truth. The majority is often wrong, and strongly resists realizing that they are wrong. The value of a2k was in comparing notes and conducting the combat of ideas, because such places are rare. Social groups, both in real life and virtual, are a dime a dozen. Optimizing a2k as a social site destroyed value, going further in this direction makes it worse.

You have created a place where the unpopular will be sunk out of view of those who dont seek it, it supports the convential wisdom with no concern for how valid that opinion is. The ruining of a2k for the "trolls" was planned, I said so from the get go. The steamroller of conformity will not be stopped, you will be left with only what ever group is strong enough to chase everyone else away. I have seen it happen on social forums over and over again, your progaming is not so special that you will avoid this fate.

You should have left a2k alone, let it be a virual arena for the combat of ideas and cultures. Your need to make it nice ruined the whole point.

I'd like to say a few things, very personally, if I may, to some comments that were made on this thread:

First of all, my intention was to open a topic of concern to me for community discussion. NOT for a problem that I thought I was having, any more than a number of other people. Here's an extract from a pretty lengthy introduction the thread:



My intention was to open up this subject of discussion to the whole community. That seemed a perfectly reasonable objective, considering we make quite a big deal about "community" here.

What I got in response (in the earlier stages of the discussion, anyway) was something quite different:







So, it appeared to be a problem with me, not the problem (which I thought I stated pretty clearly) of some debating threads on this forum, which I was hoping we could be able to discuss.

It appears that I have been far too "reasonable", which has most likely caused the "problem" in the first place! So much for community discussion.

My "lovely reasonable tones" ( ) just happen to be who I actually am. I don't know that I actually want to change who I am, online or offline. I don't know that using the "ignore" function (or not) is actually going to change my offending "reasonableness" all that much, really. I feel quite out of step with with some of you who seem to think that some sort of online personality make-over is part of the solution to the problem of trolling activities. I might add, that some of this "insight" has come from folk who themselves have had difficulties with controlling their own online aggression in debating situations. Trolls are not the only problem here when it comes to trying to discuss a topic in a reasoned way. Some fully fledged members can be just as much a problem, really.

Another thing I learned in the process of this discussion: Some people actually enjoy the conflict of aggression for aggression's sake. Maybe this is what makes things interesting for them? (Duh. For a teacher, I'm a very slow learner!) Here am I wasting my energy, trying to deflate the personal conflicts & stick to the arguments! Am I stupid or what?

Anyway, I came home from work tonight & checked out the "whales" thread. A dog's dinner of crap & irrelevancy. Trolls & "regulars". What was the thread topic again? Who knows? Who cares?
Do I even care (after all this bleating about the importance of sticking to the topic) Not so much anymore, actually. That's just the way things go around here these days. <shrug>
Am I going to put all that much energy into creating & maintaining "challenging" threads in the future? Not bloody likely. Seems like a total waste of effort."Ignore" function or not.

Who said anything about "truth"? It's a means to the end of governance, not truth seeking.




Yeah? Show me. We've gone through this before, you make your proclamations, I ask you for substantiation, and you have none.



Why do you keep playing prophet if nothing you predict ever comes true? You've been on this nonsense for over a year now, and yet you can't come up with a shred of substantiation for your claims of how the site software has changed the site (at which point you change your tune to how it's a destruction in progress and is to come and you will just stick around till it's finished). Don't you see how ridiculous you sound when you switch between confident claims that it is destroyed to predictions that it one day will be when asked for evidence? You claim the software is changes are killing the site (despite the stats looking like a V where we implemented the software at the bottom) but now claim the software isn't that influential to change the community? Make up your inconsistent little mind would you?

You apparently believe programming is at least special enough to blame your unpopularity on it so which is it?



This just highlights how out of touch you are with this community.

It's a lot less "nice" than it ever was (with a lot less authoritative enforcement on community content), it's much more a free marketplace of ideas than it ever was yet you keep going on and on about how it's squelching free speech. You are completely clueless when it comes to this community. Able2know prior to the current software and policy used to censor more and ban more and despite your misplaced strength of conviction you just plain have no idea what you are talking about.

It is obvious that u r putting a huge amount
of thought into improving the site. Thank u for your additional efforts.





David