Comment by SllX | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SllX | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not going to disagree with you, because what you say is spot on.

What I am going to do is point out that hey, maybe there are people out there that troll just to troll or troll for a particular cause, and there's a lot of them. When you have a few different sides that are generally isolated from each other and already struggling to have a conversation and throw trolls and paid trolls (astroturfing) onto the same platform, you don't have a platform that is conducive to these various sides having any kind of conversation because there are groups of people that are actively working to prevent this. It doesn't even take a very strong push to keep them apart either, they were already inclined to isolate themselves in meatspace, why would cyberspace be any different?

Facebook has more than a quarter of the Earth's population on their platform. Undoubtedly this is a hard problem to solve. An authoritarian approach is probably what they are going to end up having to go with because they're not a country or a religion, they're a bloody online advertising company.

To add to your point, nobody actually trolls in person or in real life because 1) the body language gives them away immediately and 2) they're risking getting punched in the face for their effort.

The problem with online debate is that it's too easy for people to purposefully poison a discussion that is already on shaky ground by acting in bad faith.

Usually when people on opposite sides of a discussion engage in good faith, they might not agree on everything afterwards, but it won't give them a terrible view of the opposing viewpoint and humanity in general.

Plenty of people troll in real life: streakers, hecklers, cat-callers, bullies, performance artists, pranksters, protesters, radio personalities.

The consequences for pissing people off are somewhat higher in real life, which means people tend to either troll only for causes really important to them (protesters, performance artists), or in ways that are innocuous enough they're not likely to get punched (streakers, pranksters). But if trolling is defined as "intentionally trying to get a strong emotional reaction out of people", that happens all the time. When BLM blocks an interstate, that's trolling (for a good cause IMHO, but it doesn't make drivers any less pissed). When Opie & Anthony started "Whip 'em out Wednesdays" or announced that Mayor Menino was dead, that was trolling. When people prank-call the neighbors or call in bomb threats to public places, that's trolling.

>To add to your point, nobody actually trolls in person or in real life because 1) the body language gives them away immediately and 2) they're risking getting punched in the face for their effort.

What do you count as trolling? Purposeful inflamatory remarks? Arguments that aren't honestly believed but are politely used to test the extent of some line of reasoning or the limits of a position?

For example, one common line of reasoning used with drugs and abortion is that it will happen anyways so outlawing it only makes it more dangerous. Now imagine someone taking this same argument and applying it to something like FGM or some other extreme position (though an extreme position that some on the planet do hold, just not likely the one presenting the argument). Would this be trolling, and would it depend upon presentation, in which case would someone with poor presentation presenting an argument they believe in not also be trolling?

> To add to your point, nobody actually trolls in person or in real life because 1) the body language gives them away immediately and 2) they're risking getting punched in the face for their effort.

A couple of people already got to it before me, but I wanted to add on: plenty of people do troll in meatspace.

I don't think it is quite as effective as online trolling, and certainly doesn't have the same impact to effort ratio, but it happens.

When some kid calls in a bomb threat to get out of school (happened to my Middle School post-9/11), it has an effect largely contained to that school and the immediate vicinity around it. When somebody trolls online, it has a much more subtle effect, but with enough contributors over enough time, a potentially more poisonous effect on society.

In the first instance cops can come in and clear the building discovering there is in fact, zero bombs (or alternatively, there is, but I've never personally seen that happen). In the second instance, you have a faceless group of people that are shaping and poisoning debates or preventing them from even occurring in the first place, helped by the very platforms they're trolling on. Fear, uncertainty and doubt has always been easy to spread around like so much manure, not so much with the antidotes to FUD because it is basic human nature to be cautious and skeptical of that which is different from what they know, or beyond their understanding.

In meatspace you also have more dimensions through which to interpret someone's intended message: body language, tone, choice of words, facial language, gestures, whether they can stifle their laughter and so on, and even all of that might not be enough (trolling people is easy even in meatspace, even if you're half-laughing when you do it and is a common enough flirting gesture). Cyberspace, you often only have what they wrote, and how they wrote it. It really isn't the same.

> they were already inclined to isolate themselves in meatspace, why would cyberspace be any different?

Because people generally "friend" everyone in sight. I got probably 50+ FB friends from work, the people I wouldn't call friends IRL. There's still some unhealthy obsession with the friend counts.

When I used FB, I did the bi-annual purge, unfriended everyone I hadn't talked to in months. Got some weird reactions too!

I agree with you, FB will likely implement/force the echo chambers in the end, the current open social network isn't working, and banning one side will lead to a massive loss of ad revenue.

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