Seebs said:
I'm not convinced of that. Overall, DNFTT seems to rely to
some extent on convincing people that a given person is, in
fact, a troll. People who don't believe that are unlikely to
participate in avoiding/ignoring the troll.
It sounds like you're assuming that people won't conclude that
person X is engaging in anti-social behavior unless someone
posts a message saying "person X engages in anti-social
behavior." I submit that this assumption is false; most people
realize who engages in egregious behavior (by their own
standards of course) without needing to have it pointed out. I
encourage you to run an experiment to test out this hypothesis.
Simply refrain from making ad hominem remarks for a month or two
and see if the average quality in the newsgroup goes up. I have
been running my own personal experiment along these lines for
several years now, and I am quite satisfied.
Sometimes, it really *does* matter what you think of the person,
not just what you think of the post.
Of course it does, but having it matter to me personally
and saying that it also should matter to other people
are two very different things. People are welcome to hold
any personal opinions they choose, but when they start
trying to convince me that I should hold the same opinions
they do I consider that a verbal assault at some level.
As an example, look at
Bill Cunningham's endless series of combinations of newbie
questions. A reasonable response to those from someone who has
never seen one before is *very* different from a resaonable response
to them from someone who's seen his last decade or so of asking
questions and then ignoring the answers, or "learning" something
only to have no idea even what the words used to describe it are
a few months later.
Note that we don't have to make any ad hominem remark about Bill
Cunningham to communicate the important information here. Saying
"postings from Bill Cunningham have been asking basically the same
questions and getting the same answers for the last 15 years" (or
whatever fits the actual history) is only a comment about what
he's written, not about him. Saying things about the _writing_
should always be appropriate; saying things about the _writer_
almost never is.