Hacker News Reader

Comment by _8j50 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like people just don't know how to deal with trollish people like elon or trump, best you can do is ignore them and they lose the one thing they live for: attention.

View on HN

That doesn't work, because they just escalate or get other people to act out on their behalf. And really, why should we construct society around the behaviors the worst people? There is some evidence for the proposition that rude responses to provocations is in fact the most effective moderations strategy.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03697

You and other commenters are not getting what I am saying. Ignore them does not mean they don't face consequences, it means they don't get attention for it. Like no news headlines, no social media posts and likes,etc... if they have their own fanbase then ignore them too, ban, block, arrest,etc... just don't give them notoriety and fan the flames.

It's like with school shooters and serial killers, you shouldn't mention their names, publish their manifesto or do movies about them precisely to avoid copy cats or to give them what they want. If elon messes up twitter, leave it, don't give him attention for it.

Alas, they will always get rewarded for the attention-seeking behaviour. Always. Because it’s a sad fact that there are always people who are attracted to destructive attention-seekers, just as there are people attracted to mass murderers, satanic telepreachers, and promoters of poisonous ideologies. They simply don’t see these characters like you and I do. There’s money to be made by connecting these populations, from pamphlets and Speakers Corner to websites and Social Media. It’s always been a problem. But now, with a global population of billions, these trollish people are basically guaranteed to draw enough attention to have dangerous influence.

The calculus changes for someone like Musk, who is not a troll to a large fraction of the population. In that case, it's beneficial to post something like the GGP because it signals to other people two things: first, you're not alone in disliking this person. Second, it's okay to express that opinion. That second one is important since there is a fine line between ignoring something you don't like and self-censorship out of fear of reprisal.

So, while I agree that you should ignore nobody trolls, I DO NOT think you should ignore famous, politically/economically relevant trolls. It's an act that comes with some risk, and is therefore courageous and admirable.

Or send them to jail. :-) It would be harder with Elon, but between securities fraud and willful safety negligence, it’s probably doable. :-)

I agree with the notion of what you're saying, and I usually make a pretty strong point of avoiding this topic, but a counterpoint can really only be so obvious before I can no longer avoid stating it: Trump was the president. It's not really unreasonable to not "ignore" a person when they are the individual elected by the people of your nation as their representative.

> It's not really unreasonable to not "ignore" a person when they are the individual elected by the people of your nation as their representative.

Is that a triple negative?

This kind of 101-level advice is fine for dealing with random edgelord trolls with 10 followers. However, it's nigh-on impossible to simply ignore the likes of Musk and Trump when newspaper columns are full of their activity and they have such a fucking large impact on us.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com