As we start to see more users join, it's inevitable to see trolls (especially low-effort trolls) making more of an appearance and trying to be controversial and noticed.
Best just to scroll past them. They want to spark unwinnable arguments and rack up negative rep. If something seems absurdly ridiculous or inciteful, just move on. It's not even worth down voting.
You either haven't been on the internet long enough to recognize this very common slippery slope, or you do recognize it - and you're rooting for the slope.
Way back in the way back we used to call comments like that “flame baiting”. It’s trying to start a fight, nothing more. Forums and BBs I moderated used to technically ban it, but generally the rule has always just been “don’t feed the trolls”. Meaning: don’t comment, don’t downvote, don’t bother reporting. They just want attention, the only thing that hurts them is realizing that this board will ignore them just as completely as their parents already do in real life.
Yes. Back then there wasn't any upvoting or downvoting, so the only way you interacted with a troll is either engage them or ignore them...preferably the latter.
better yet - create whole sections of lemmy devoted to trolls and their fun times. this is the best answer. it also helps ensure that lemmy can never be sold or made profitable. thus avoiding the horrible dying mess that is reddit.
Harassment, hate speech, or any other form of harmful behavior will not be tolerated.
Now, I can't read ernest's mind to determine what he meant by this line exactly, but this kind of mean spirited, bad-faith jab falls under "harmful behaviour" in my book.
i think it's dangerous to be too broad with this definition
harmful in my mind is saying explicitly racist, homophobic, promoting violent, etc type of stuff
i think freedom of expression is something we should not give up easily. in actually harmful speech, i think the pros outweigh the cons. but him saying the word "triggered" is not harmful
but him saying the word "triggered" is not harmful
It implies that being against hate speech and harassment is a wrong opinion and while completely isolated and out of context it might not seem harmful, it's part of a cultural shift towards normalizing those things, and implies that anyone who cares is wrong. Seeing that go unchallenged just emboldens buttholes like that.
If you want to be neck deep in that bullshit, you're more than welcome to join exploding-heads.com. Can we have ONE space online that isn't infiltrated by assholes?
You don't have to be a dick to others on the Internet. You can make that choice. Just because you CAN post hateful shit anonymously and not have to face real life consequences doesn't mean you HAVE to.
Some people literally would prefer to see the world burn. No idea what’s up with that form of psychological gratification from destruction, but fuck them.
You’ve got it. Its out-groups are highly isolated, through a combination of downvoting and en masse automatic sub-bans based on guilt-by-association. Naturally they’re nowhere to be seen on the front page either.
But also, remember not to automatically assume someone with negative reputation is a troll. Given kbin currently doesn't calculate reputation correctly (it counts boosts not upvotes).
I'm putting this as a top level comment, but I mean to be talking here to the people suggesting to report or block, or moderators looking at this and thinking of taking action against trolls.
Honestly, I don't think we should bother checking their reputation score even if it was working correctly. They're either engaging in shitty behaviour or they're not. All of us engage in shitty behaviour sometimes - we all get hangry, we all have bad days, and we're all suffering in some way or another - and the fact that someone has a record of saying popular things doesn't mean their shitty behaviour needs to be accepted or engaged with.
Call it out, ignore it, or report them. If there's a pattern of shitty behaviour, the mods or admins can have a chat with them about it.
I’m not sure why anyone cares about karma or points or whatever they are called over here. I don’t ever look at that for other profiles, and only noticed that it even existed when I finally logged into my account on a computer rather than a mobile.
I think to tag on to what you said…I think it’s fair to say that a troll can only be labeled as a troll based on the content and responses they create.
Yup, I've got significantly more upvotes than downvote in total (only one reply of mine so far got downvotes, from the bigots it was calling out), but my overall score is still negative at the moment. Which I personally don't really care about, I just wouldn't want others assuming I'm a troll because of it.
Edit: looks like these last few replies got me off that negative rep lol, thanks
(I don't have the brain power to figure out any thing of any significance from this but if anyone is interested: 20 upvotes on replies today got me from -3 to +1)
Edit again: though having now posted an article from an indigenous perspective on a Canada day celebration post, I am already worse off from when I started lmfao
If you're using kbin, the reputation is calculated between your boosts and downvotes. This is a flaw from how this instance tried to retool the platform, but will be rectified soon so that reputation will be the simple arithmetic of upvotes minus downvotes.
In other instances, the upvotes are called boosts, but here on kbin, the functionally of boosts is how your content is getting promoted in other instances, from what I understand. Boosts are like retweets on other users' activity feeds here in kbin.
...what the fuck? The guy who's got a record of felonies he's in court for, and has been absolutely the most fascist piece of shit to happen to America could easily have leftists supporters? The guy who lost "bigly" in the popular vote and created the most partisan and polarized political voters possible? This is Q Anon level of reality.
If there is a leftist in the "lots of trump supporters", they are by definition, not a leftist.
zizek talks about this a lot. who are trump's most loyal fans? sure, there are the harvard educated elitists who like that he lowers taxes on the rich and the business magnates and whatnot. but the bulk of it in terms of absolute numbers is the redneck poor people
why do they support trump? because their jobs were lost to outsourcing, their wages aren't going up so housing is more expensive, their towns are slowly rotting away. they see these things and feel a (in my opinion, justified) anger towards the establishment.
someone like Trump and the GOP in general comes around, blames the gays and immigrants and tells them they will fight for them. we all know it's a lie and that they are voting against their interests - but the MAGA propaganda has gotten to them first
these same triggers (stagnant wages, anger towards the establishment/elites, erosion of infrastructure, inaccessible healthcare) also causes people to become leftists
these people could have easily flipped one way or the other and the only different is propaganda. we need to reach out to these people and convince them that the left has viable solutions for their problems. if you're interested, i can find a zizek bit where he talks about this but I've seen it myself talking to a lot of trump-supporting conservatives.
some of them are racist bigots and whatnot, but others are just really ignorant old folk who genuinely want the best for most people and have been misled by propaganda
Except the difference is: leftists have empathy. Sympathy. They care for their fellow human whom they haven't met. They are called "progressives" for a reason. Right wing is being regressive, to hurt people not like you. It's about cruelty specifically.
You're talking about moderates that don't give a shit. I'm talking about the actual term leftists.
What they said is that just because you don't agree with the opposite opinion doesn't make the person saying that opinion a troll. They may be a hateful motherfucker, but a hateful motherfucker who is trying to talk in good faith.
They aren't arguing some enlightened centrist "everyones opinions are equal" bullshit. They're just arguing that opposite opinion does not equal automatic troll.
You can block people and communities… I’m a trans woman; naziism and really just social conservatism works against me. I still think they should have a space to spout off, just as I should have a space to spout off about how irresponsible, bigoted and cruel their statements are. I also think there is nothing wrong with safe spaces; I mean look at raddle.me and on the opposite end Facebook and Twitter. Taking someone’s tounge doesn’t prove them wrong, only that you are afraid of what they have to say. The words of a fascist should be said and maybe repeated so they can be struck down by those who prefer love to hate.
Thank you for this. The only way to combat ignorance isn't too silence, but to educate. When you silence someone, you isolate them to places where their opinions are only reaffirmed and never challenged, thus exacerbating the ignorance.
" Hey you want the humane and equal treatment of all peoples, and I have an opposite opinion that some people should be subservient or eliminated. Woah woah why are you banning me."
It's a painfully American sentiment that was prominent in the civil war. "Hey we just disagree on slavery..."
No, but someone rocking up to a news magazine just to post “Trump won and everyone knows it” with no news article is trolling. Some of these folks are trolls trying to piss people off.
It’s not what people in that magazine “want to see.” Every post save the troll post linked to a news article, with little to no commentary. Thus the “News” name.
Even among people who like trump, there are plenty of people who know that he lost the election.
Even if Biden cheated (and I’m not saying he did), people who cheat to win elections are called the winner of the election. Laws tend to fine campaigns for cheating rather than changing the outcome of the election.
As an example where a campaign was fined for malfeasance during a campaign, the Clinton campaign was fine for misbehavior in the 2016 election related to the steele dossier politico.com/…/dnc-clinton-campaign-fine-dossier-…
However, although that example was of a losing campaign, up in my home country of Soviet canuckistan, several election cycles ago the conservative Stephen Harper government was fined for election fraud, and that’s all that happened. They were officially in charge and they stayed that way until the election of Justin Trudeau in 2015.
Typically, lawmakers want election issues to be dealt with by the electorate, they’re extremely extremely wary about stepping in and changing elections on their own.
While we’re on the topic though, I would like to remind everybody that it is extremely typical for the losing side of an election to claim that the other side cheated. In 2000, there were plenty of people pointing out fuckiness in the supreme Court decision that ended George W. Bush the election, and in 2004 election machines were singled out as a potential method of cheating by the Democrats when John Kerry lost the presidential election, and in 2016 there were lots of cries saying that there was election interference that led to the election of Donald Trump.
Oh Jimmy, it's not always about the effort or length of a post that defines a troll. A troll is someone who purposefully stirs up conflict or posts inflammatory or off-topic messages to distract and control the conversation, often eliciting emotional responses.
Check it out: So, imagine you're playing with your favorite toy car, alright? Then someone, let's call them SJ_Zero, comes over and says, "Oh, that's a nice car, but did you see this super-duper rocket? And oh, did I tell you about this ultra-cool submarine I once had? And oh, there was this time when I played with a helicopter..." and on and on they go!
What happened to your toy car? Poof, it's forgotten, lost in the whirl of rockets, submarines, and helicopters. That's what SJ_Zero is doing here, taking us on a whirlwind tour of election history, far away from our original chat about the 2020 election and how Trump lost.
So you get it Jimmy? And that's why you shouldn't feed the trolls.
The_Donald was not about political opinions. It was a hate farm that made neofascists out of people who came for the lulz. By all means let's have actual conservatives discuss politics as a counterpoint to more liberal views, but smack the fascists down - because it's the only way to truly have a tolerant society and civil discourse: Intolerance as politics must not be tolerated. If that basic rule is ignored, everything else fails.
I really like this interpretation of the Paradox of Intolerance:
The Paradox of Tolerance disappears if you look at tolerance, not as a moral standard, but as a social contract.
If someone does not abide by the contract, then they are not covered by it.
In other words: The intolerant are not abiding by the terms of the social contract of mutual tolerance. Since they have broken the terms of the contract, they are no longer covered by the contract, and their intolerance should NOT be tolerated.
Argue all you want. But if you're going to argue that the line between what is acceptable and what isn't is what is legal, first off, uh, no (fascist rhetoric is legal in most places), and second, whose laws do you want to apply?
You can start by boosting instead of using the arrow, which is actually currently only counting as favoriting and does nothing to counter any reduces on a post. It's an oversight that's being worked on and will eventually change, as I've understood it.
I’ve already seen one troll who’s going hog wild. What’s annoying is, i blocked them, but still got a notification about them when they replied to one of my posts (I couldn’t see the reply on the post itself, but could see it in my notifications). So just be aware that blocking someone doesn’t mean they’re gone.
It's clear that kbin still has a lot of bugs. Guy running it is a bit overwhelmed right now. Hopefully they're able to fix issues like this sooner rather than later.
Weird! I get notifications on mobile (the web app) and on the full browser (attached).
Sorry that you guys have problems ... maybe try turning the notifications off and back on? I know I had initially changed them a few times, so maybe that was needed and I just never noticed any issues while KBin was less busy.
There's a few tickets floating around regarding the user flow for how blocking users actually works. This is probably one of those untested cases where you've blocked someone but you can see see them when they do X.
The blocking workflow is definitely something that needs some improvements, but I think right now everyone is focused on stability (especially with the influx of new people everyone's expecting)
I just want to point out that not everyone with an unpopular opinion is a troll. I think this is important as many people get victimized by a group for posting something unpopular, getting ganged up on. Be careful where you post!
I wonder if people are going to abuse downvotes and reports. The downvote is not a disagreement button, and reporting just because you find a comment distasteful is not what it should be for.
So you downvoted because you used it as a disagree button. End of story then?
Anyway, let's put that aside and discuss. How is it destructive? If there is a troll harassing a user then is ignoring it better than reporting the troll? How so?
Let me give you a concrete example. This guy exists https://kbin.social/u/WorldKnows45Won/comments
Why should the comment he called the other guy "retard" not be reported? Not only that, the same guy made troll posts sprading misinformation like Trump winning the 2020 election, so it's clear it isn't just a one time thing either. And in the future when there are more bots and troll accounts running around, why would not reporting them be the better option?
I am of the belief that banning users or deleting posts, even inflammatory ones, harms free speech and hinders open communication. If you feel a user is "harassing" you (insofar as that's even possible, given you can freely ignore their comments), attempting to have the user banned just pushes the community toward becoming an echo clamber. I say this because people are very, very bad at distinguishing harassment from mere heated disagreement in the first place.
So if someone make a wrong accusation of someone else or if they make a death threat or doxx someone the comment should just stay up. Am I hearing your position correctly?
And I think you missing something. People perceptions are different and they aren't necessarily "correct", yours and mine included. Report doesn't automatically remove someone, but it does allow admins and mods to see it, in other word, get a third party to look at it. Multiple reports also mean more people thinking this is harmful. Just because you don't agree with other people's perception doesn't mean they are wrong and you're right or vice versa. Not to mention that certain kinds of harassments and hate speeches directly break the ToS.
Furthermore, reporting != banning. Reporting on a comment is the voice in that comment is listened to, and it's been decided that it's harmful.
You make some very good points that I hadn't really thought of, honestly. It seems like I didn't consider the full implications of my position. I still like to tend toward leaving things up, but I agree with you now that that probably has to have its limits somewhere.
I think it's nice to have a spectrum of agreement on "this is okay", as long as we don't stray into the more universally agreed "this is not okay". It's probably one of the more robust ways to decide where to draw the line when in reality a hard line doesn't exist.
I will say overall that this community has been largely much more positive and troll-free than Reddit. We’ll see how long it lasts, but man it’s been nice
They do seem to be super salty over in the subreddits that were discussing all this, like Save3rdpartyapps. A lot of the people posting now are just the anti trolls because the vast majority of the posters (including me) followed through and deleted everything and left.
You can block them on kbin, but just be aware that if they reply to you or your post, you’ll still get a notification of it. You won’t be able to see their comment on the page it was posted to you, but it will be sitting in your notifications until you clear all them, since you can’t get rid of individual ones.
It seems like it’s something in the process of getting fixed, since I stopped seeing notifications for a few hours today. On mobile, I usually see notifications in the menu bar at the top next to my user name when new ones come in.
You might want to check your settings to see if you have notifications turned on.
And they can also still see your comments after you blocked them, at least in my experience. Blocking people is not too useful right now because of that IMO.
Depending on the circumstances, yes, but if you were arguing with someone and blocked them after you thought the argument was over but they still replied for example, you cannot see their reply, which could lead to misunderstandings.
This is why I've generally been trying my best not to engage with the obvious trolls and bigots at all (not even downvote) but instead just block and move on. They don't become aware of me, and I no longer see them. Not perfect yet (the block going both ways would go a big way towards that), but it works ok for now.
I mean I would still report them depending on severity but yeah that's of course also a way to do it. I'd absolutely love to see block becoming 2-ways instead of peekaboo.
Oh yeah, I'll still try to remember to report if I see they're on one of the big instances I already recognise, but otherwise I might not in case the report just goes right back to them (like it did with the exploding people) in which case I'm not exactly sure what to do other than post a warning, but I'm rarely the first to notice this kind of behaviour, nor do I really want that kind of spotlight, so I might not be comfortable doing a public announcement about it.
Edit: though I'll admit, I do often block people for things others might not consider as problematic, and feel like if I reported in those situations I'd just get ignored (and if the report goes to the wrong kind of person, potentially targeted for being "too sensitive" or whatever) which is why I'll often keep it to myself.
That's what I mean by severity if you're blocking people for mundane reasons there's of course not always a need to report.
By the way, as far as I personally know (because I asked this myself), if you report someone from exploding heads for example from this instance the report should go to ernest.
Ok, just had a read through, that makes a lot of sense about where the reports go, though I'll admit I still get a little anxious about reporting "out of kbin" users just because I'm still getting my head around how it all works and all the information moving around the fed. But I'll get there (and things will be tweaked and adjusted, I'm sure).
E: oh, and it's not the mundane blocks I mean, it's stuff like casual sexism or ableism that some might not consider "serious", but that's a whole other conversation for another time haha
Oh now I understand what you meant, no I consider both to be bad. Both don't belong here, as well as any other -ism with bad intent. I believe that at the moment reporting the really serious stuff is the important thing to do and as the site grows, and we get more moderators so we don't overload 1-2 people with reports, I wouldn't see any reason not to report the less "serious" stuff.
Yeah, I think more people getting and dealing with the reports would definitely help, not just them in dealing with it, but also us users, in reducing the anxiety/guilt of reporting and "creating" work for someone else who is already swamped (even if rationally I know it's the bigots' causing the extra work, not those reporting them).
But hey, it's all still new and growing so no pressure on anyone, I don't doubt things will eventually get resolved in a way that works for most people involved (can never please everyone, and that's ok!).
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