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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

"Against this backdrop, the luminaries who do succeed dramatically change our lives, which could be seen to vindicate tech’s mythology of itself. After all, we _feel the impact of those successes with every stroke of the keyboard, every block of a troll_."

Uhh, what!? The success of the technology industry is that we use it to segregate society? That it's as natural as typing?

Is that really the narrative, or is this journalist using their platform to push their viewpoints while they report news?

If the ultimate vindication of the technology industry is that we can use it to completely filter out people we dislike from our lives, then we should take all of this and smash it right now. We should focus our energies into building connections between people, not tearing them down.

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It sounds like you are defining troll as "someone I don't agree with," but that's not how I read it.

I read trolls as bad actors; people acting in bad faith just to get a reaction / cause someone else pain.

Trolls are a subset of "people we dislike."

You're putting words in my mouth. Not only did I not say that, but your interpretation isn't any better either. Blocking is pretty much final.

I mean, why do we imprison and try to rehabilitate people instead of you know...killing them?

"Blocking trolls" (by this I specifically mean denying them access) is mob justice. In fact, there's even a supreme court ruling preventing the government from denying people access to social media. This isn't okay.

Feeling good about who gets punished doesn't make the form of punishment any better.

Blocking someone on the internet is not tantamount to capital punishment. Get help.

I am not saying that it is.

I'm comparing two forms of punishment that there is no way of coming back from. Learn to read.

With blocking, you could ask someone who knows you both to at least plead for your reinstatement.

With capital punishment, no amount of pleading by friends will help.

With blocking, you still have access to the entire rest of the world, other than the one person who blocked you. (Yes, if it's Google/Amazon, that's a big and massively inconvenient someone, but still).

With capital punishment, you have no access to anything you ever had or ever would have had in your life.

Those are massive differences.

At the very least, although there maybe a superficial sameness, it is a horribly broken analogy.

> With blocking, you could ask someone who knows you both to at least plead for your reinstatement.

Facebook, Twitter, etc have quite publicly permabanned people. I'm sorry but what recourse from that has been demonstrated so far?

You're bringing up a person-to-person case that I have _three times now_ stated that I am not talking about.

You're bringing up a person-to-person case that I have _three times now_ stated that I am not talking about.

People are doing that because that's what "block" in the social media context usually means. Sites ban, users block. And that's what the journalist probably meant too, so your position rather sounds like an attack on a strawman.

OK, for the sake of discussion, let's say that you actually said "permanent irrevocable ban by the host of a major service" and not "block", which usually applies to users.

The lack of appeal is indeed egregious.

However, it is NOTHING like being killed / capital punishment. It is a ban from a single service, and nothing else in the world. If that service is such a large part of your life that you might as well be dead without it, you REALLY need to get a life.

Mostly, I'd suggest putting more thought into your arguments, and being a bit more gracious when readers notice your lack of clarity or precision. I used to make those kind of arguments too, and I found that everything got better once I figured out it was a waste of time, and I was better off saying, 'oh, I didn't make that clear enough, here's what I meant to say..."

Anyway, have a great weekend!

> However, it is NOTHING like being killed / capital punishment. It is a ban from a single service, and nothing else in the world. If that service is such a large part of your life that you might as well be dead without it, you REALLY need to get a life.

So you acknowledge that I stated I wasn't making that comparison but you felt the need to state the same as everyone else anyway?

> It is a ban from a single service, and nothing else in the world. If that service is such a large part of your life that you might as well be dead without it, you REALLY need to get a life.

You do realize that there are certain businesses/industries that _entirely_ depend on your access to social media, right? In a great many cases, losing that access is losing your income stream with possibly no hope of recovery.

The insidious part about that is that I'm not talking about people who make video content to be shared. If you work in Infosec, Twitter is your primary industry networking tool. It's literally required. If you buy and sell car parts, you are literally dependent on access to certain Facebook groups for customers and inventory. If you play Legacy format in Magic the Gathering or you're a card dealer? A lot of that business these days happens over Facebook. Most of you may not believe me when I say this, but it's the truth. And those are just the first three cases that I can think of that I have direct awareness of.

I agree with you more than some others here are doing but I just wanted to say the "learn to read" part is not constructive.

I have been guilty of the same kind of nonconstructive dialog but ... Let's aspire to better, eh?

Please don't respond by violating the site guidelines yourself, even if the other person did. That only makes this place worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't be personally abrasive, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Being blocked on one out of hundreds of platforms is hardly equivalent to being killed, more like being banned from a mall after defecating on a bench. Being blocked by an individual user is an equivalent of stern stare, disapproving shake of a head and never getting any party invitations again. All justifiable for intentional trolling.

As I mentioned in the other comment, I am not equating the two, I am merely stating the case that punishments that are final/irreversible are bad news.

Also, in the comment you responded to, I had already stated that I am specifically _not_ referring to individual-to-individual interactions.

As for your mall analogy, maybe if said mall is the one that 1/6 of the human population shops at, the nearest competing malls only have 1/20th of the people/stores/stuff and there's only 1-2 competing malls where the shopkeepers speak the same language as you.

Actually, after thinking about it, I do agree with you on platform-wide permabans, they just encourage trolls to find ways to create throw away accounts.

Timed bans (with exponential increase for reoffenders) or permabans with a process to lift it are better. Then trolls who can be beaten into submission would be, those who can't will get effectively permabanned eventually and public places can be kept one step away from being toxic cesspools they would otherwise turn into.

What have you added other than to change "I" to "we"?

How does one determine what values are pertinent to "we"?

"don't enable harm" (ahimsa) would seem to be a "we" universal, but how to scope it?

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