Comment by neveroffensive | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neveroffensive | Hacker News Reader

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> I would love to see websites start taking this a step further, and automatically start banning any users who are consistently voted beneath a certain threshold, just how in real life, everyone ignores the crazy guy on the sidewalk corner after his first diatribe is found to be crazy.

Why even bother banning them. This just silences the opinion, which technically could still be valid. I'm sure at some points in history gay and civil rights activists would have been the ones getting banned.

I agree about the down-voting, but I truly feel we need to stop babying people in regard to controversial opinions. If you can't reject and ignore a blatantly racist and unfounded opinion, I'd argue you shouldn't be participating in discussions of any kind. This seems like a fundamental skill necessary to coexist in human society.

Edit:

I'm not saying you shouldn't be allowed to participate in discussion if you get angry and offended by an opinion. This is totally fine. However, if you need someone to step in and hold guns/ban hammers to peoples heads to exist, maybe the problem isn't with society, but with you.

As an early user of the Internet, I was taught "don't feed the troll". We also, once a troll was persistent and identified, banned them.

Do today's users feed them, have they not got the message I learnt, or is it that today's web tools allows a troll to be fed much easily?

I see the need for moderation, (4chan is actually heavily moderated as an example) and I also see the need for users to have the skills in identifying and not feeding trolls. Identifing trolls and actively not feeding takes effort. Perhaps todays web assumes users shouldn't expend effort and are overly moderated. Freedom Vs comfort?

We have long since entered into an "Eternal September" in regards to things like this. For everyone that knows not to feed the trolls there are seven people who are happy to do it.

Trolls are also getting increasingly more adept at not appearing like trolls - their entire goal is to draw you in, if it's too easy to spot then it doesn't work. They adapt and evolve just like the rest of us.

Yup. One of the problems we have is that we've given up on making useful tools to let people filter out what they don't want to see. We've given up on client-side filters and are telling everyone that we know what is best for them, and they should only see the comments we want them to see.

The internet absolutely needs to be filtered, but by the users themselves, not companies who are just "innocently" doing it for them. Let people decide for themselves if they want to see something or not.

Do you really think that every time a minority gets on line they should just have to put up with racism directed at them? Your solution if they don’t like it is to just not go online? Do you see the environment that that creates?

Getting down-voted so much here I can't even maintain a discussion. My post rate limit is too low.

Yes I do see the environment it `could` create. That's the problem with a world without fascism/authoritarianism, people will always be subject to potential emotional trauma.

The only way to stop it is to assert your subjective view of reality on the world.

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