Yeah I’ve been growing a little frustrated as well, as my tone in that earlier comment probably indicated. But a troll isn’t the only stubborn person around here, and I actually care about this community and the broader Fediverse project.

I agree, they don’t seem particularly concerned, which is why I’ve steadily pivoted more towards general conversations on what trolling actually is, what the classic trollface.jpg really represents, and methods by which it seeks to accomplish its goals. If this or any other community I’m active in is going to allow these behaviors, it won’t be able to claim ignorance of how it all works.

It’s admittedly a big topic though.

Personally I am very willing to pay full price and even occasionally buy pointless extras I don’t care about if it helps reward their passion for a project I see as a valuable contribution. I’ll even pre-order or provide them some free advertising in some cases. Especially if its the sort of dev where it seems like their long-term survival might be in question.

I feel like you can usually tell when the dev needs money or doesn’t.

That’s part of the problem too. They don’t understand what a dedicated troll’s real long-term goals are. Good on them for never having been one, but I’d rather have a rare example of a healthy large internet community than a trolly one.

The Constitution is a very short document, you can read the whole thing in about 10 minutes or so. It does not include very much in the way of details, generally speaking.

Reading it when you’re young is one thing, you don’t really understand how systems come together anyway at that age. Rereading it as an adult is a bit of an eye-opener though, as it’s easy to see just how little it really establishes, and what sorts of directions abuses could potentially come from.

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript

I think they’re just erring on the side of free speech in general. They’ve always been fairly lenient with comment behavior that isn’t extremely blatant. Since they don’t seem to understand the nature of these things, we sort of have a responsibility to educate about it.

So what about the trolling behavior in comments?

People do not complain about his posts, let me repeat that, his posts are not the problem. Nobody cares about his opinions. Nobody minds that he likes third parties, that part is fine.

It’s the behavior in comment sections that is the problem. How is it that we have a rule 4 that prohibits trolling, but we allow a user who consistently exhibits comment behavior intended to simply irritate whoever is interacting with them? Low effort, consistently full of logical fallacies, frequently misrepresenting himself and others, etc. These indicate a troll.

Again, it is comment behavior that is the problem. How many of his comments need to be removed before it is identified as a problematic account? I think we deserve some transparency here.

Where and how do you draw the line with regards to trolling behaviors in comments sections?

edit: Let me quote him from just below here, where he replied to someone replying to you right here:

I don’t have to explain anything to you or anyone else. Feel free to stop responding and commenting on my posts if you don’t want to hear replies from me. Thanks! :)

Does this add anything to a conversation? Does this further discourse in any constructive way? Does this encourage people to positively participate in our community?

Main benefit of a megathread is it helps prevent engagement from being splintered. So instead of having a dozen separate threads about an issue, with each one only having a few people participating, the issue could have one single megathread where everyone can go and all the interaction can get concentrated in a single location. This improves the experience for everyone discussing the topic, and also improves the experience of everyone who is uninterested in the topic since they won’t be seeing large numbers of threads about it.

I think topics that are fairly specific, with a short chronological window and would include a lot of people wanting to talk about them make good megathreads. Major sporting events, major singular political events, big product releases, revolutionary scientific breakthroughs, long-awaited press releases or disclosures, major court cases, big concerts/public gatherings, etc.

There is a line where you don’t want things to be too big, though, otherwise they become a slog to wade through. In these cases it can be broken into several megathreads, or you can even just make a community for the topic. Like, the Olympics would be a good example of too big for a single megathread.

I’m not sure we can call Peronism fascist. While it was populist and nationalistic, it’s missing that hallmark blood-and-soil (this land for our bloodline) aspect that really marks out fascist ideologies.

You can’t really call yourself fascist if you’re trying to say all your people are equal, you need to be trying to establish some sort of hierarchical order where these citizens are always better than those citizens.

They’re fairly small polls conducted of people who specifically watched the debate. Definitely not representative of the overall electorate.

tbf, them taking responsibility for other people’s accomplishments has gotten fairly common in recent years. They need to be able to show something to their voters asides tax cuts for the rich, half-built walls and bans of Muslims entering the country that get struck down in court. So why not steal credit for other people’s successes?

Btw, did you all know that I’m actually the lead dev of Mastadon? Yep, it was just some barely-running service before I came along, and I got it fixed right up. Look at how good my project is doing! I’m just the greatest, aren’t I?

"…I don’t see any way that he could match her level of intensity and humor,” said a Walz ally who was granted anonymity to speak freely about the governor.

So don’t try. Go for down-to-earth, earnest, hard-working, straight-talking and honest.

Glad to hear he’s working with Pete, I think that’s probably the perfect combo of midwestern sensibilities and savvy to disarm Vance’s Yale-trained style.

That’s true. We should not necessarily be taking the most extreme measures to simply render the tactic fully ineffective, though. At a certain level it has to be allowed to work, because its leveraging against our humanity, which we should not be discarding too completely. Beyond even the ethical concerns, disregarding them too much creates future strategic problems by instilling more hatred in future generations.

It’s a question of where to draw the line. It’s been particularly egregious in Gaza, where unlike Lebanon, there was nowhere really safe to flee to.

No problem, your perspectives are important as well. I just like trying to remind people not to paint with too broad a brush.

Putting 100% of the blame on either of the sides in this one is not a terribly good idea. Sometimes a conflict has a clear historical oppressed and oppressor, but this particular one has each of the two sides doing quite a bit of foul play for over a century. The Arabs more in the earlier days, the Israelis more in the recent days.

Dealing specifically with the use of human shields, while yes they do get used, at a certain point you shouldn’t just be shooting through them just because you can. Israel is also not sufficiently meeting its obligation to help distribute the food and care for the innocent people displaced by this war. If they were to do so, perhaps they could leave the next generation with less hatred in their hearts.

A trustee is someone that manages the assets for someone else, in this case an organization.

You keep that saved like its some damning thing, but it’s really not. Trolling is actually harmful to a community. That’s not.

I think basement dweller is much more likely. Let’s not forget, trolling is fun at a certain age. It’s a recreational activity, engaged in as a way to enjoyably pass the time. This is why the advice always used to be to not interact, and just starve them of any engagement so it stopped being enjoyable. To not feed them.

That stopped working when real effects also became achievable, but we shouldn’t forget that the first motivation is still there. Just because ignoring them won’t make them go away now, because they’re trying to actually work on a nebulous goal, doesn’t mean it ever stopped being fun.

I mean, is it so hard to believe, when we used to get regularly DDoSed and even occasionally hacked, that we’d also pick up some dedicated trolls from time to time? It’d frankly be pretty naive to think we’d be so lucky, if someone has ever spent any time in the seedier corners of the internet where these things come from.

It’s that fun aspect we have to remember. I mean, I disagree with ozma, Linker, jimmydore, lots of people very regularly, but they’re not stringing out dozen+ long comment chains just trying to irritate the person they’re interacting with at whatever moment. They’re not trolling, they just have strong opinions. It’s specifically that having fun at other people’s expense thing that makes this one different. And frankly, it’s very common on the internet, just usually not so much in moderated spaces, when the mods are being appropriately responsible. The rest of the internet is still out there though, can always go spend some time on 4chan’s /pol/ if you need to see the sorts of things we’re dealing with. Maybe a LoL lobby, I hear those are lovely. Maybe the comments sections under some Gamergate youtuber’s videos, or Ben Shapiro or someone.

Plenty of places you can find people that just want to have a good time at your expense. For fun, with just a side dose of fuck-the-world.

The Heritage Foundation was founded on February 16, 1973, during the Nixon administration by Paul Weyrich, Edwin Feulner, and Joseph Coors.[11][12][13]

So uh, which one endorsed Harris? And Proj 2025 has dozens of authors, not one btw.

I like some of Stein’s policies, but a lot of them are just silly and naive. She wants to abolish the Electoral College, for instance. Great, but since that’s directly in the Constitution, she’s going to get an amendment through with a 2/3rds vote in both houses of Congress and ratified by 3/4ths the states? Which kinda requires some of the red ones?

Then big one for me, is “peace-loving” Stein is critical of Ukraine aid. I cannot support hanging them out to dry like that, even though we promised to help keep them secure after convincing them to de-nuclearize, after the fall of the USSR in the Budapest Memorandum.

Our word has to be worth more than that.

I’m all for progress towards a utopian world, but offering one as your policy platform is a little manipulative when we have a government of checks and balances that has some republicans in it.

… yes, a person that engages in trolling is a troll. What did you think it was?