Its also impossible. You're not going to have a close conversation with a group of people when a little kid is jumping up and down and screaming for attention in public. Ignoring them doesn't work for either trolls or bullys. Either they run the show, or you do something about them, end of story.
> Ignoring them doesn't work for either trolls or bullys.
This goes against decades of received wisdom: DNFTT, anyone?
For what it's worth, I agree with you, and I always thought simply not feeding trolls was pointless: There's something similar to a broken window effect in terms of overall tone. If someone comes to a site, sees a lot of negative comments and general asshattery, they'll file that place away as "where the asshats are" even if those comments are being studiously ignored by the regulars. That means the only ones who want to comment there will be the ones who want to act like what they see around them: asshat trolls.
I also think that ignoring them until they go away is a bad strategy: Even if you ignore one or two of them successfully, there's dozens if not hundreds of them waiting to join. You can't outwait them all without the community degenerating due to the broken window effect I mentioned above.
I kind of took your first sentence and started replying to it by saying about what you said afterwards - I thought that was your main point! My typed reply:
> Do not feed the trolls only solves the problem in smaller communities, or at least only just holds off the effects of the troll (topics spinning out of control, pointless arguing, accusations and recriminations) until they can be moderated. Its not a solution for a community, and never has been.
It doesnt work now, and with the diversification and use of the net by vulnerable groups.
Having a users on a generalist forum suddenly exposed to flashing lights to induce a seizure, or ambushed by images of dead people, or being attacked for being a woman or a minority group?
Yeah you cannot expect people to shrug that off, without also expecting a large mass of humanity to be essentially living without a normal emotional response.
