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NancyLebovitz comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! - Less Wrong
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I don't know if this is worth saying, but you look a lot more like a troll to me than she does, though of a more subtle variety than I'm used to.
You seem to be taking behavior which has been shown to be in the harmless-to-useful range and picking a fight about it.
Thanks for letting me know. If most people disagree with my assessment, I'll adjust my troll-resistance threshold.
I just want to make sure we don't end up tolerating people who appear to have trollish intent. AspiringKnitter turned out to be positive, but I still think that particular post needed to be called out.
Well Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism.
You're welcome. This makes me glad I didn't come out swinging-- I'd suspected (actually I had to resist the temptation to obsess about the idea) that you were a troll yourself.
If you don't mind writing about it, what sort of places have you been hanging out that you got your troll sensitivity calibrated so high? I'm phrasing it as "what sort of places" in case you'd rather not name particular websites.
4chan, where there is an interesting dynamic around trolling and getting trolled. Getting trolled is low-status, calling out trolls correctly that no-one else caught is high-status, and trolling itself is god-status, calling troll incorrectly is low status like getting trolled. With that culture, the art of trolling, counter-trolling and troll detection gets well trained.
I learned a lot of trolling theory from reddit, (like the downvote preventer and concern trolling). The politics, anarchist, feminist and religious subreddits have a lot of good cases to study (they generally suck at managing community, tho).
I learned a lot of relevant philosophy of trolling and some more theory from /i/nsurgency boards and wikis (start at partyvan.info). Those communities are in a sorry state these days.
Alot of what I learned on 4chan and /i/ is not common knowledge around here and could be potentially useful. Maybe I'll beat some of it into a useful form and post it.
That's interesting-- I've never hung out anywhere that trolling was high status.
In reddit and the like, how is consensus built around whether someone is a troll and/or is trolling in a particular case?
I think I understand concern trolling, which I understand to be giving advice which actually weakens the receiver's position, though I think the coinage "hlep" from is more widely useful--inappropriate, annoying/infuriating advice which is intended to be helpful but doesn't have enough thought behind it, but what's downvote preventer?
Hlep has a lot of overlap with other-optimizing.
I'd be interested in what you have to say about the interactions at 4chan and /i/, especially about breakdowns in political communities.
I've been mulling the question of how you identify and maintain good will-- to my mind, a lot of community breakdown is caused by tendencies to amplify disagreements between people who didn't start out being all that angry at each other.
On reddit there is just upvotes and downvotes. Reddit doesn't have developed social mechanisms for dealing with trolls, because the downvotes work most of the time. Developing troll technology like the concern troll and the downvote preventer to hack the hivemind/vote dynamic is the only way to succeed.
4chan doesn't have any social mechanisms either, just the culture. Communication is unnecessary for social/cultural pressure to work, interestingly. Once the countertroll/troll/troll-detector/trolled/troll-crier hierarchy is formed by the memes and mythology, the rest just works in your own mind. "fuck I got trolled, better watch out better next time", "all these people are getting trolled, but I know the OP is a troll; I'm better than them" "successful troll is successful" "I trolled the troll". Even if you don't post them and no-one reacts to them, those thoughts activate the social shame/status/etc machinery.
Not quite. A concern troll is someone who comes in saying "I'm a member of your group, but I'm unsure about this particular point in a highly controversial way" with the intention of starting a big useless flame-war.
Havn't heard of hlep. seems interesting.
The downvote preventer is when you say "I know the hivemind will downvote me for this, but..." It creates association in the readers mind between downvoting and being a hivemind drone, which people are afraid of, so they don't downvote. It's one of the techniques trolls use to protect the payload, like the way the concern troll used community membership.
Yes. A big part of trolling is actually creating and fueling those disagreements. COINTELPRO trolling is disrupting peoples ability to identify trolls and goodwill. There is a lot of depth and difficulty to that.
For one thing, the label "trolling" seems like it distracts more than it adds, just like "dark arts." AspiringKnitter's first post was loaded with influence techniques, as you point out, but it's not clear to me that pointing at influence techniques and saying "influence bad!" is valuable, especially in an introduction thread. I mean, what's the point of understanding human interaction if you use that understanding to botch your interactions?
There is a clear benefit to pointing out when a mass of other people are falling for influence techniques in a way you consider undesirable.
It is certainly worth pointing out the techniques, especially since it looks like not everyone noticed them. What's not clear to me is the desirability of labeling it as "bad," which is how charges of trolling are typically interpreted.