It's not a bad metaphor. If your community is ignoring trolls instead of banning them, it's effectively sending the message that the trolls are very welcome. I've never observed that a no-moderation community is free of trolls, and ignoring trolls often results in them just taking over because they just start talking to each other and everyone else leaves.

These things are caused poison because even a small amount can cause serious problems if left unchecked, and the effect creeps out across an area (how many people are hit) like poison spreading.

I think what you're missing is that a very large amount of people simply do not enjoy a certain style of discourse to the point that they'll opt out of a community that doesn't ban that discourse. You may not like it, you may think those people are weak or something, but the rest of us want to talk to them, and we want them to feel welcome.

> It's not a bad metaphor. If your community is ignoring trolls instead of banning them, it's effectively sending the message that the trolls are very welcome. I've never observed that a no-moderation community is free of trolls, and ignoring trolls often results in them just taking over because they just start talking to each other and everyone else leaves.

Which form of trolls from my post are you talking about? I insist that we not pretend these are the same group of people.

I think that good moderation filters out the baiters and lets the people who believe what they're saying stay. And contrary to what you're saying, I don't think that such communities end up with just trolls. There were plenty of reasonable conversations on Reddit before Conde Nast took over and dropped the banhammer.

> I think what you're missing is that a very large amount of people simply do not enjoy a certain style of discourse to the point that they'll opt out of a community that doesn't ban that discourse. You may not like it, you may think those people are weak or something, but the rest of us want to talk to them, and we want them to feel welcome.

I'm not missing that--in fact, I don't enjoy talking to people with hateful beliefs either.

But the alternative you're proposing is an echo chamber where you don't have to hear those people, but they still believe what they believe, and those beliefs become our leaders and laws. If we ignore bigots on the internet we get bigots in office.

I think you're very confused. The idea that rational people have to engage thoughtfully with irrational bigots is pure nonsense. It is not the duty or obligation of anybody to engage with those who hate them.

The reason we get bigots in office by the way is not because trolls are banned. It's because powerful interested want bigots in office. Bigotry sells. It's very easy to screw people over if you can distract them by having them hate on some out group. It is naive to think that taking with bigots will change this.

And here is the point: social change doesn't proceed through rational discussion. Never has, never will. Real change requires organization and solidarity and protesting and marching and uncompromising demands.

If you want to waste time engaging with trolls have at it. You will find that these people have nothing but contempt for discussion and no interest in being swayed by logic. For the rest of us we have far better things to do and banning trolls and bigots is the obvious choice.

> I think you're very confused. The idea that rational people have to engage thoughtfully with irrational bigots is pure nonsense. It is not the duty or obligation of anybody to engage with those who hate them.

"Have to" and "obligation" in a general sense are things I try to avoid saying. They don't exist in my belief system, and I apologize if I mistakenly said otherwise.

What I'm saying is that if we want bigots to change, we can't just expect it to happen.

> The reason we get bigots in office by the way is not because trolls are banned. It's because powerful interested want bigots in office. Bigotry sells. It's very easy to screw people over if you can distract them by having them hate on some out group. It is naive to think that taking with bigots will change this.

I think you've confused cause and effect here. Some powerful interests certainly see bigotry as an end goal, but I think most powerful interests who support bigotry see it as a means to an end. As you said, bigotry is a distraction to achieve other goals. Bigots are easily manipulated if you don't care about bigotry: you just pretend to be a bigot and that gets you power, and then you can do what you actually want to do. If there were not bigots to be manipulated, powerful interests wouldn't push bigots into power.

> And here is the point: social change doesn't proceed through rational discussion. Never has, never will. Real change requires organization and solidarity and protesting and marching and uncompromising demands.

Organization and solidarity and protesting and marching aren't incompatible with rational discussion, and in fact none of these things work if they aren't a means of putting forward a rational discussion.

Modern protest movements need to read Martin Luther King's writings and understand what he really did. Every single protest he lead was carefully designed to make a point in the rational discussion of the time. The bigoted viewpoints of the time: that people of color were violent, dangerous, less intelligent, etc., were struck down one by one on public television by MLK's protests. Bigotry is based on lies, and MLK made it impossible for people not to see the truth. When bigots feared people of color would be violent, he showed them people of color peacefully being beaten. When bigots feared takeovers by blacks, he showed people of color only wanted normal things like sitting where they wanted on the bus and drinking from the same water fountains. He didn't simply try to talk over the people he disagreed with, he listened to their concerns and showed their concerns to be invalid.

Harvey Milk, as far as I know, didn't write about his tactics, but they are clear in what he did and said. When bigots saw homosexuality as a foreign, unusual, threatening thing, he encouraged people to come out so that bigots could see that gays were normal people all around them. When bigots saw homosexual culture as an invasion of their neighborhood, he showed it also brought economic benefits ("You don't mind us shopping at your liquor store." "We both pay taxes for your child's school").

Can you explain to me how you think protests work to change policy? If all they are is simply trying to yell your opinion louder than your opponent, why should people in power care? If protests don't persuade anyone, what's to stop everyone voting for the same people and getting the same bigots in power? If our only tool is escalation, they'll just escalate back, and they can escalate further because they have guns. :)

> If you want to waste time engaging with trolls have at it. You will find that these people have nothing but contempt for discussion and no interest in being swayed by logic. For the rest of us we have far better things to do and banning trolls and bigots is the obvious choice.

If by trolls you mean people who are saying inflammatory stuff to enrage people for their own entertainment, sure, engaging with them only entertains them.

But if you're talking about people who are just trying to live their lives and think that bigotry is the way to do that, I very much doubt you have tried talking to these people, because this has not been my experience at all. If you approach talking with someone about their bigotry as if they were a human, with compassion, and address the actual fears and hang-ups that cause them to be bigots in the first place, people do change. It doesn't always happen quickly or at all, but sometimes it does. And more importantly, I've never seen it happen any other way.

> Which form of trolls from my post are you talking about? I insist that we not pretend these are the same group of people.

I haven't found it particularly wortwhile to distinguish people who are saying terrible things to troll, or because they believe them. They're very often the same group, because reasonable, emphatic people are going to neither say nor believe those terrible things.

If you cannot carry a conversation with consideration for the other people in it, I do not want you in my community.

> There were plenty of reasonable conversations on Reddit before Conde Nast took over and dropped the banhammer.

I perceive Reddit as a very good example of the kind of community I _don't_ want, because any deep, complex, or otherwise not aligned with the popular discussion is impossible there, so I'm afraid we're at an impasse.

> But the alternative you're proposing is an echo chamber

Luckily, I haven't proposed an alternative, so it's rather interesting what imagined alternative you're making that statement about...

> I haven't found it particularly wortwhile to distinguish people who are saying terrible things to troll, or because they believe them. They're very often the same group, because reasonable, emphatic people are going to neither say nor believe those terrible things.

> If you cannot carry a conversation with consideration for the other people in it, I do not want you in my community.

Okay, you can want whatever you want, and I understand why you want that. I also have the gut reaction to someone saying something bigoted where I to avoid the person so I don't have to see it, or respond with vitriol and ostracization, because that's what feels good in the moment. But if people continue to insist on putting their head in the sand and take actions that feel good rather than actions that actually address the problem, these problems are only going to get worse.

> I perceive Reddit as a very good example of the kind of community I _don't_ want, because any deep, complex, or otherwise not aligned with the popular discussion is impossible there, so I'm afraid we're at an impasse.

I have had fairly in-depth conversations and said plenty of unpopular stuff on Reddit all the time, so I'm not sure what you're basing this.

> Luckily, I haven't proposed an alternative, so it's rather interesting what imagined alternative you're making that statement about...

You said, "If your community is ignoring trolls instead of banning them, it's effectively sending the message that the trolls are very welcome."

> But if people continue to insist on putting their head in the sand and take actions that feel good...

I'm not sure how you go from "I don't want trolls in my community" to "it just feels good, you're putting head in the sand". I'm not putting anything anywhere, I know exactly what I am doing. I don't want trolls in my community.

> these problems are only going to get worse

Not in my community they won't.

> I have had fairly in-depth conversations and said plenty of unpopular stuff on Reddit all the time, so I'm not sure what you're basing this.

This is a subjective thing obviously but it's not like it's some new sentiment I made up, plenty of people find Reddit terrible to have interesting conversations on. Particularly a thing you'll see mentioned often is that shorter, less complex posts are often more liked than longer, more complex posts requiring a lot of effort to write.

> You said, "If your community is ignoring trolls instead of banning them, it's effectively sending the message that the trolls are very welcome."

Which is not a proposal. It's a statement on consequences. A proposal looks like this: "To have a well functioning community, you need to have this, this, and this, and not that". I've said nothing of the sort. Communities are complicated and require design, and there's a lot of variety within communities besides just "free for all" and "echo chamber".

You have a conversational style which seems to like to presume that the person you're speaking to is doing something they never claimed they're doing (keeping their head in the sand, or suggesting an echo chamber), which might be why you find Reddit tolerable, because this is very much the kind of interaction I find really annoying and could do without. It's always easy to feel right about everything if you just put words in the other person's mouth.

> If your community is ignoring trolls instead of banning them, it's effectively sending the message that the trolls are very welcome.

I have never seen it play out that way in practice.

> I've never observed that a no-moderation community is free of trolls

I've never observed community with moderation and no trolls. You will not ever eliminate them completely, so better approach seems to be ignore them and just ban outright spam.

And I did observe almost unmoderated community that had trolls, nobody cared about them, and everything was fine.

> very large amount of people simply do not enjoy ...

I think you are doing a lot of projection here. Maybe people agree with you, but considering how broken are your arguments I would not take your sweeping generalizations seriously.

The issue is that many in group 1, baiters, intentionally and effectively mimic those in group 2, earnest people. So sadly, although they are different, there is no way to reliably distinguish them from their posting behavior.