Alicorn comments on Dealing with trolling and the signal to noise ratio - Less Wrong
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I'm active (I read literally everything on Less Wrong, or at least skim) but I'm timid. I don't know what I am and am not supposed to be banning/editing, so I confine banning to spam and editing to obvious errors of formatting or spelling/grammar.
In June I asked Eliezer for moderation guidelines, since there has been an uptick in trolling or just timewasting poorly-informed ranters, but he just said that he thought it needed a software fix (the recent controversial one).
Thanks for your contributions. I scanned this whole thread and am talking to Eliezer about possible solutions. Right now the troll toll isn't enough, but maybe that's because nothing will deter a SuperTroll like Will Newsome.
ETA: I should clarify that I like Will Newsome in person, but on Less Wrong his comments very often seem to be deliberately obscurantist, unhelpful, and misleading.
You don't deter SuperTrolls. You ban them and move on. This is a very simple problem that you guys are vastly over-complicating.
Ban him and ostracize him socially.
You're right. It seems silly to say that nothing, with emphasis, will stop Will when banning him and any obvious sockpuppets hasn't even been tried. (This isn't particularly advocating that course of action, just agreeing that Luke's prediction is absurd.)
"Ostracize" does not work well online. You don't get direct feedback on how many people read what. (Even the downvotes are evidence that someone did read the comment, and expended some of their energy to downvote it -- which supposedly is part of what the trolls want.)
There is no online equivalent of a group turning their backs on someone in ice-cold silence. Just "not answering" is not the same thing... that happens to many normal comments too.
As far as I can tell Will Newsome hangs out in Berkely with SI folks.