Endless arguing

[Ian Collins]

so he lied about both you

Oh no, let's not start another one of those threads, spinny might be
watching

 

[Noob]

Sure. But if everyone else does it, and I don't, then I have an almost
entirely clean city at no cost to me. So if I'm selfish, where's my
incentive?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

 

[Tim Rentsch]

It hasn't been my experience. In my experience, people are quite aware that
stating that a given person's posts are substance-free baiting, or that there
is no benefit to responding to them, is precisely equivalent to asserting that
they're trolling, or that they're a troll. It's like stating that someone
sometimes kills people for money, because that's much more polite than calling
them an assassin.

I would like to suggest, as respectfully as possible, that
there's a level of social nuance that you're overlooking.
Certainly it has been the experience in comp.lang.c that posters
who some would describe as "trolls" respond differently to
different styles of followup. No one likes reading irrelevant
messages, but only the "anti-trolls" (if you will allow me a
somethat tongue-in-cheek phrase) become targets. Obviously
different ways of commenting on postings considered to be
irrelevant can evoke different kinds of responses.

There is a secondary problem, which is that in some cases, a community
which never does anything about trolls creates a perception that the behaviors
of the trolls are permissible. [snip elaboration]

This statement mischaracterizes my comments. I am not advocating
doing nothing (nor in fact am I advocating doing something).
That decision is up to each individual as he or she sees fit.
What I am advocating is that, _if_ one has chosen to post
something because of any kind of articles posted to the
newsgroup, confine the comments to being about what was written,
and avoid commenting (either directly or obliquely) about the
personality, or any other qualities, of the writer rather than
about the writing.

 

[Seebs]

I would like to suggest, as respectfully as possible, that
there's a level of social nuance that you're overlooking.

Quite likely.

One of the reasons it can matter who you're talking to is that, statistically,
an awfully large number of people are going to have cognitive abnormalities,
which you need to know about to deal with them effectively. In particular,
for instance, "autistic" isn't just a label spinny can use to harass me; it's
also a functional description. Such that you don't need qualifiers like
"as respectfully as possible", because I don't really experience that layer
of social stuff to begin with.

Certainly it has been the experience in comp.lang.c that posters
who some would describe as "trolls" respond differently to
different styles of followup. No one likes reading irrelevant
messages, but only the "anti-trolls" (if you will allow me a
somethat tongue-in-cheek phrase) become targets. Obviously
different ways of commenting on postings considered to be
irrelevant can evoke different kinds of responses.

That's true.

This statement mischaracterizes my comments. I am not advocating
doing nothing (nor in fact am I advocating doing something).


That decision is up to each individual as he or she sees fit.
What I am advocating is that, _if_ one has chosen to post
something because of any kind of articles posted to the
newsgroup, confine the comments to being about what was written,
and avoid commenting (either directly or obliquely) about the
personality, or any other qualities, of the writer rather than
about the writing.

You have a point. In theory, saying that a person's posts are
meaningless and offered only to obtain results ought to have the same
effect as asserting that the person is a troll, but in practice, people
sometimes react differently.

Certainly, people can react to that kind of comment about their posts with
a great deal of hostility. However, come to think of it, except for the
real crazies, they usually don't react as badly to the comments about their
posts when those comments are accurate, as they do to comments about their
person when those comments are accurate.

-s