Feed the trolls and they will keep growing, ignore them and they will dry and die -Jorge On Oct 25, 2013, at 9:40 PM, "John Levine" <johnl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> the chilling effect of vigilateism is far worse than spam or trolls. ... > >> I could not agree more. By condoning such measures people are damaging the >> diversity they are supposedly trying to support. > > I could not disagree more. The spam and trolling create an unpleasant > environment that drives people away. Anyone who's run mailing lists > for a while has seen this pattern over and over, in which a tiny group > (sometimes just one) of obnoxious subscribers ruins a list and most of > the useful members leave. The ones who remain are thick skinned or > socially oblivious, and are disproportionately middle aged North > American white guys who acted like this when they were undergrads. We > are all big boys and girls here. It should be entirely within our > abilities to be reasonably polite and relevant in our correspondence. > > In this particular case, the execution was clumsy, but the action was > entirely appropriate. We saw messages that were utterly irrelevant, > from an address that had never sent anything else, in a style that > strongly suggested it was a sock for a chronic troublemaker. Why > should we put up with that kind of nonsense? > > I also have to laugh at "vigilanteism." There is no government > process that vigilantes are circumventing; the sergeant at arms > kicking people off the list IS the process. > > A useful kind of vigilanteism is private messages to people > encouraging them not to engage with trolls, or to back off when > they're getting too abrasive. I have received both, and I appreciate > that people have taken the effort to give me a nudge. > > R's, > John