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Comment by theshrike79 | Hacker News Reader

Rule 14: Do not argue with trolls — it means they win.

This has been a basic tenet of the Internet for decades - until Twitter and FB became huge.

Now the regular people don't know or understand this and continue to interact with trolls (retweeting, subtweeting, basically bringing attention to their idiocy). This just feeds the anger cycle and shuts down all attempts at sane discourse.

You don't tell a troll you're not arguing with them, don't block them (that's a win), you just ignore it completely. If everyone would follow this rule, the crazies would be left alone shouting into the emptiness.

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In case anyone is unsure of what the Rules of the Internet are:

https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/30662

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/rules-of-the-internet

___

As an aside, Godwin's law is why code reviews had to be locked down at one of my previous employers:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

> 18. Everything that can be labeled can be hated.

That's a good one. Surprised I haven't heard that one before.

Godwin's law was not the reason that your code reviews needed to be locked down, it was that your employer had a terrible work environment, terrible employees, or both.

Actually it was neither of those. Just because a discussion is approaching Godwin's law doesn't necessarily mean anyone is being offensive or, as you say, terrible.

Also, sometimes it's not anyone's fault. It can just be down to circumstances.

I fail to see a reason why code reviews, in a professional environment, would go that way if the environment is not screwed up.

The "environment" rapidly changed and the organisational structure didn't keep up with the competing goals within the team.

None of the people were terrible. The company wasn't terrible. No-one was at fault.

If someone is mentioning Hitler in a code review someone is at fault.

No one had mentioned Hitler at that point. See another child comment for clarification.

Edit: To quote the CTO later on "I could see where the endless review discussions might end up heading so I split the team into product and project before we hit Godwin's law."

Sounds like the CTO was the Godwin's law violator, albeit obliquely.

Sounds like said code reviews were getting outright toxic and vile; referencing Hitler was probably not the main issue there.

Yep, it was an organisational issue with different work types.

To quote the CTO later on "I could see where the endless review discussions might end up heading so I split the team into product and project before we hit Godwin's law."

If they had become vile then someone would have been fired. CTO did a good job and stepped in before that happened.

That's subtly different to what you said before. Godwin's Law wasn't why you had to lock down code reviews. It was in anticipation of the law being true that you did it, which isn't quite the same thing. Self-fulfilling prophecy, perhaps.

Godwin's Law was part of the CTO's reasoning to split up the team and lock down code reviews to within each specific team.

So it forms part of the why.

Maybe they were just writing a lot of `AbstractHitlerBeanFactoryBuilder` classes.

On a more serious note, there is an argument for all computing being fundamentally authoritarian. You have one root account dictating how other users can consume resources, and from that you descend onto things like "the project owner". If this model is not tempered downstream, I can see how people can end up shouting "nazi" at each other.

(still, I guess one should probably catch himself before violating Godwin's Law in a work environment...)

RMS was anti-root (or anti-"wheel", I can't remember) for basically this reason.

There certainly is a lot to be analyzed in the power relations of control of the means of production and distribution of information, from the society wide scale to the individual device, but technologists are remarkably bad at doing this.

But also why conflate the arrangement of performance sensitive digital procedures and the social structure behind several billion people living on the same planet?

You should optimize for very different metrics.

Because it incentivises a specific mindset, which then cascades into everyday situations. Computers do what they are told (by root), other humans don’t do that - it can be a source of friction and frustration. A frightening amount of radicalised terrorists eventually turn out to be IT people... IMHO we don’t yet appreciate the influence that the tools we live and breathe have on ourselves.

I think about this a lot.

Twitter and FB brought a lot of people to the internet who weren't exposed to cultural things like Rule 14 that I feel went a long way to maintaining civility.

They also normalized bringing your identity online. Back in the days i.e. when slashdot would have been HN everyone was anonymous. I feel like it made it easier to focus on ideas instead of the people saying them.

Ah simpler times...

4chan is a shining example of the outright failure of anonymity on the internet shines a light on the discussion. That concept just introduces people who will argue completely in bad faith, have their argument taken down eloquently by a new user not realizing what is going on, the that same troll will just post the argument again, constantly. Real names are absolutely not necessary for a good discussion but social and structural consequences are very important in removing trolls.

HNs rule if allowing throwaway accounts for discussing sensitive content is a good thing, but I'd prefer some kind of linking to the main account to make it obvious that if you're making a green account you troll it will effect your main account as well.

Facebook is a shining example of the outright failure of Real Names Policy on the internet. That concept just pushes people to extremes, and excludes moderate voices that will be canceled by all sides for having an opinion that is not exactly in alignment with either extreme

Real Names polices that have been tried have also proven to do nothing to remove trolls at all, in fact the only thing that remains is shit string trolls and extremist that want to yell at each other after the shit stirring trolls rile them up

It is concerning that I am seeing more and more people push for a resurgence of "Real Names" policies on the internet as a way to curb extremism and/or trolling even after it has been proven to do nothing of the sort

I don't buy it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September has been around two decades before Facebook and Twitter.

You may be looking back into the past with some rose color glasses. SD was not that good either. Its moderation system basically enforces first posting being the ones who got to control the conversation. So it encouraged camping so you could yell loudest. They added a 'troll' over on soylent. But that did nothing. It just gave people more ways to abuse each other. They even gave more people more mod points. Thinking that would fix things. But it still has the -1/5 problem SD has. The up/down system that hacker and reddit use has its own issues very similar to SD. Early ideas get the most attention late ones get nothing. Wisdom of the crowd sometimes works. But it also can create a negative feedback loop where bad ideas do pop to the top touted as good ones.

One of the underlying issues is the use of text. Text is a terrible way of conveying conversational meaning. Which I personally think is how many people consume the internet. "oh that is a good idea" can have so many shades of meaning from "that is actually a really terrible idea lets never talk about that again" to "yes I 100 percent agree lets do that right now". In conversation depending on which word gets the inference the meaning changes. In my head I hear it one way. But you read it a different way and the next person reads it in a totally different way.

It's a bit of a double-edged sword, no? In many contexts, having identity tied to your online profile should make people act more like humans and less like they're role-playing their anonymous internet troll persona.

>>In many contexts, having identity tied to your online profile should make people act more like humans and less like they're role-playing their anonymous internet troll persona.

This is only true if everyone agrees on facts. It is perfectly reasonable for people to get shocked by the other side's views if they do not disagree on the facts. When people are in fundamental disagreement with other viewpoints, I would say their behavior is often one angry message away from the anonymous troll personas. It is a very short fuse.

A good example is the idea of the "cancel culture". Do you think it is a reality? Someone like Stefan Molyneux would say yes. Someone like AoC would say no.

The person who thinks cancel culture is a real thing will say things which just seem completely idiotic to the other side, and vice versa. And they are still using real names.

Using real names in fact becomes a liability if there is actually a cancel culture. So, for example, I am safer making this point anonymously. If I accidentally end up offending you, at least I don't have to worry about losing my job.

> In many contexts, having identity tied to your online profile should make people act more like humans

That's the point, isn't it? A person can be good or bad, but when you group people together via social media, you find out just how many of them are just terrible human beings. People acting like humans is exactly what you don't want to happen.

So.. you want people to act like robots?

The psychologists and drug companies would love that.

> If everyone would follow this rule, the crazies would be left alone shouting into the emptiness.

On the other hand, unless that's society consensus, you'll just have the crazies screaming, the media picking it up and amplifying it and the politicians acting on it.

Unless we vote on everything in person (or commit to not changing policy), not publicly disagreeing with something is a problem.

I've had this happen (accidentally, there wasn't any malicious intent, I believe) in a community I'm part of. Some people felt that a certain policy was unfair, so they petitioned for its removal. I (and apparently most others) hadn't bothered paying attention to the "Feature Request" forum for policies, so nobody spoke up to point out the side effects of the intended change. The change went through, we suffered the fallout. The side effects weren't "omg the community is broken now" large, otherwise the change would surely have been reverted, but they were significant enough that you could measure it.

That's my main issue with the whole public debate thing. You can either tune out and fatalistically accept whatever happens, or you can tune in and try to stop what you consider to be detrimental. There's no "hey, this works, let's just keep it working, and not spend so much energy on how it could be changed" position. I usually choose fatalism these days because my energy is limited, but of course that means that those who choose to invest their energy into politics instead of contribution are in charge, and I'm not so sure they're the people we want to be in charge.

Trolling as a tactic won, because DFTT was never sufficient and banning was the only way. Once trolling was normalized by a presidential candidate, it was impossible to argue that he should just be ignored.

Trump isn't a troll, he has no sense of whimsy and he obviously cares way too much. The whole point of old-school trolling is to wind up the rubes over some trivial nonsense for your own amusement.

Incidentally, PHP is a fantastic language and Haskell is hot garbage.

If your going really old-school 'trolling' look up Red herring...trump trows allot of them around.

>Incidentally, PHP is a fantastic language and Haskell is hot garbage.

That's NOT Trolling if both of them are fantastic.

Words change their meaning. Troll has not meant that in more than a decade.

But the modern meaning is basically either just "someone I disagree with", "someone I don't like", "someone acting in bad faith", or "someone in the out group". It's a word that means practically nothing now.

You completely misunderstand trolling if you think a real politician using his real name would be trolling on the internet!

Saying stupid things or even outrageous (in your view) things is not trolling unless it's said for the sake of provoking people who hold those views. If you actually believe your stupid points of view, you should not be called a troll, merely an idiot.

> Saying stupid things or even outrageous (in your view) things is not trolling unless it's said for the sake of provoking people who hold those views.

Are you implying that there is some other motive to the President's tweeting? I always understood it as simply a way to piss off his opponents (and thus distract them with nonsense while energizing his supporters).

Gleefully annoying people by posting is the very definition of trolling.

It seems pretty clear that he’s narcissistic, it’s not like his behavior has all of the sudden changed when he had a shot at being the presidential candidate. So I would say the motive is always to keep the spotlight on him and to bully others. He doesn’t want to be viewed as weak so he’s always on the attack. It’s not some well thought out strategy but it’s working with his base because a lot of them agree with that strategy. It’s the terrible way of thinking that you are manly and strong by picking on others, when in actuality you are insecure. I mean there are a lot of things behind his rise but each party invokes the name of the other party to convey negative feelings. I mean I heard my father call something communist, it actually wasn’t but that word is used by Republicans mean something that is bad. It’s an odd time in US politics, and you can see that the actual Conservative Republicans are stepping aside from their real views and values because it doesn’t matter as long as their team is winning, even if their leader loves Russia and is actively pushing the US towards authoritarianism.

That was sort of a rambling comment, but it’s just so odd to me that hate can be amplified so easily now a days. It’s been good to see the fight for equality lately with BLM, equality is a very American value (despite us needing to go so much further in that regard). But we have a President saying there are good racists out there and how we need to preserve the Confederacy. It makes no sense.

> equality is a very American value

Is it? The USA has one of the least egalitarian societies in the developed world.

Assuming you're talking about equality of opportunity: given the ridiculous cost of higher education and healthcare in the USA (as opposed to most developed countries, where it's nearly free to attend even the best universities or get treated in hospital), do you really believe there's a high level of consideration given to equality in American society?

We've all stopped saying provocative things on social media for fun, because it's become too easy to rile people up like that - it used to actually take effort before people would take your flame bait seriously. Shooting fish in a barrel is no fun!

According to the pseudo-aristotle's "On Trolling"

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

"the troll in the proper sense is one who speaks to a community and as being part of the community; only he is not part of it, but opposed. And the community has some good in common, and this the troll must know, and what things promote and destroy it: for he seeks to destroy. Hence no one would troll the remotest Mysian, or even know how, but rather a Republican trolls a Democratic blog and a Democrat Republicans."

"... indeed some say that Socrates was a troll, and so that the good man also trolls. ... he told the Athenians to care for their souls, rather than money and honors, and showed that they lacked knowledge. And this is not trolling but the contrary, exhortation and truth-telling— even if the citizens get very annoyed. For annoyance results from many kinds of speech; and the peculiarity [idion] of the troll is not annoyance or controversy in general, but confusion and strife among a community who really agree."

Maybe have a look at 'internet trolling' and the history of it, a 'red herring' a Troll and monkey island:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring

https://monkeyisland.fandom.com/wiki/Troll

> unless it's said for the sake of provoking people who hold those views

Trump does it precisely for that reason. You can see his trolling spiking when he has to divert attention from bad news. Most of his activity is basically 50/50 between "energize base by creating outrage that feeds into victim narrative" and "define what news media will talk about next".

It's not particularly original, Berlusconi did it too (albeit with more traditional means).

None of that is trolling, it's just populism.

No true Scotsman?

Anyway, riling people up for your own entertainment is both contemptible and far too mainstream at the moment. Rod Liddle has had a newspaper column out of it for decades. As have the Sp!ked magazine lot.

What's the inverse of "No true Scotsman"? Literally almost everyone is Scottish?

If all trolling means is angrying up the masses, then I guess Mussolini and Juan Perón and Bernie Sanders are all fabulous trolls.

There is a subtle difference in traditional propaganda and modern troll-influenced versions.

Traditional propaganda wants to be true, it wants to persuade you that what it saying is the truth. It bombards you with consistent messages that, repeated often enough, become true in the collective conscience. That’s the classic XX-century playbook.

Modern techniques are not meant to expose a consistent truth. Statements are often retracted or modified (“i was misinterpreted”). The real aim is to generate an immediate fightback, a virtual altercation, so that your side can claim to be a victim of “the system”; to force opponents into arguments that are based on false premises (and hence “unwinnable”) but that enable dogwhistling your sentiment to people; and to manipulate the media into covering these arguments rather than more substantive issues, effectively performing a DDOS on the capacity of regular people to be informed.

Modern politicians like Trump and Berlusconi thrive on the opposition arguing their proclamations as they were traditional propaganda, because it ends up amplifying the subtexts that establish an emotional bond with their electorate. Truth does not matter (“enough of experts”), not even establishing truth matters; what matters is triggering the response you want out of your opposition, which cascades into positive electoral effects by counterpoint. That’s very troll-like.

Some of these techniques are not entirely new, of course, but they seem to have become the principal instruments of political action now, and that’s novel.

The problems with Twitter are not trolls in a conventional sense, so these tactics won’t work.

Twitter should just disable the retweet feature. I know they won't, though. Sigh.

Right, retweets are there to enhance "engagement" and "engagement" sells ads. Twitter is a platform for selling ads and nothing else - that you're allowed to converse on it is a secondary feature.

>Twitter is a platform for selling ads and nothing else - that you're allowed to converse on it is a secondary feature.

Isn't that just every social media or discussion site? This seems like a nothing statement.

> Isn't that just every social media or discussion site?

Do you see ads next to this comment? What about on IRC? Mastodon? What if I told you that even many of the youtube series you may like are available on other platforms and you can pay a subscription fee to see them without ads?

There are alternative to "engagement" based networks, they exist now and you can support them and choose to use them over Twitter and Facebook.

Very nice guide on Avoiding Trolls:

https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...

Rule 14a: never argue on Twitter.

Yelling one-liners at each other is the opposite of a thoughtful discussion.

I can understand strangers or acquaintances to some extent but you’ll have siblings and parents and children hanging their dirty laundry out in the open ???

Like WTF... it’s worse than having a yelling match out in the driveway for neighbors to hear because eventually the neighbors forget.

> Rule 14: Do not argue with trolls — it means they win.

> This has been a basic tenet of the Internet for decades - until Twitter and FB became huge.

This predates Internet by a long way and it is called "common sense".

Agreed. But I think the point is it goes out the window, particularly on facebook and twitter. I.e., the "common sense" isn't that common, and the platforms enable and amplify the behaviour.

Common Sense does not appear to be very common then.

> Rule 14: Do not argue with trolls — it means they win.

Now of course, if you systematically do that, the version of reality that trolls are broadcasting wins. Because no other then trolls voice is to be heard.

And that what happening on the internet for years, where people who were harassed and trolled were expected to shut up and leave the place. And recently, I am equally thankful to historians who do engage with what trolls are saying. Because "smart" people just used to let trolls version of it to stand.

That rule made people who followed it fail and loose. So, people are not following it anymore.

Indeed. You can't have "the antidote to bad free speech is good free speech" and "don't feed the trolls" at the same time.

Ignoring the troll is complicity now, okay.

Sometimes yes, just like in real life. Not always through.

What is complicity through, is to favoring trolls speech. Telling troll victim to shut up or to tell him that what is happening to him is because he was not sufficiently silent.

Sometimes, trolling is crazies. Other times, and quite often, it is tactic to shut up opponents. And it works and used to work. People who ignored trolls are not to be heard, because trolling stopped their speech.

And yet other times, what you call troll is someone espousing genuine opinion, but it is too comfortable and politically beneficial to pretend it does not exists.

what does "too comfortable" mean? I should choose to suffer because of outragebait on the Internet? that's crazy.

No, I mean something else. The situations of:

A: "Nobody is saying X!" B: "This person here is saying X, I am getting tons of messages to that effect!" A: "These are just trolls! It is all ironical and they dont count!"

If you are invested in people claiming X is not existing or not an issue, then it is comfortable to pretend that anyone who say X is a troll. But often they are not. They are expressing their opinions or are trying push others toward that opinion.

That part of about people who will insist that someone is troll to stop discussion, because they dont like the discussion against said person. It was not meant to be about people who simply do not cared about the whole thing, decided this is not the case where they will join the argument.

I am definitely not saying that everyone must join every single argument or outraged group on the internet.

Silence is generally viewed as complicity yes.

yes exactly. these days, not playing is no longer a winning move.

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