Hey y’all, keep an eye out for trolls. I have the impression there are a few accounts on here with users whose only purpose is to instigate others and get angry reactions out of people.
Are there any way to report these users? I haven’t found a report button for users specifically.
Your comment history doesn’t exactly shy away from hyperbole and antagonizing either. If you smell shit everywhere you go, check your shoes.
Sea lioning in my DMs really just proves my point. Sure, there are trolls out there, but your attitude also attracts and encourages incivility. Don’t feed the trolls.
I may have had some arguments with people, but I never go around trolling people for fun.
EDIT:
First you make baseless accusations of me of being a troll, then when I ask where you felt that was the case, you accuse me of sealioning?
What the heck is wrong with you?
Honestly. You attacked my reputation. How did you expect me to respond to that? I tried to see this as an opportunity to learn from my mistakes so I reached out to you to understand where you felt I could have done better. And you come back and attack my reputation even further.
Obviously, this is upsetting. How do you think most people would react to such attacks? And you’re telling me I’m the one antagonizing others?
But how do you know the people you want to accuse and report do? How do you know they are antagonizing for fun?
I get how someone who is a mod in a LGBT community is going to run into more of them, but for other mods, those trolls trolling people for fun are just going to be people that raise arguments they don’t like. Such a feature could easily devolve into wrongthink thoughtpolicing into a We Happy Few dystopia under the wrong direction. Don’t be a downer,
take your joymake comments that just generally agree with the gist of what we all agree with! You don’t? Time to get slapped by the ban hammer!Have you tried confronting these users openly? Like saying something like “We have to deal with people who participate in bad faith and create arguments to antagonize people, and because of reason X, Y, and Z I believe you may be one of them. Please be more respectful and/or informed in your comments, or we may have to take action. If we are mistaken, we apologize but we have limited time, resources, and awareness to moderate this community, so we may have to act even when we are ultimately mistaken so we do ask some cooperation on your behalf.” If they are trolling for fun and antagonizing, they are going to continue to argue, but you don’t have to afterwards since you’ve already explained yourself by their next reply. “I don’t have the time to argue any more, help us make more time by not being so conflictive to the community we are trying to moderate.”
That’s a really good question. I usually rely on the age of the account and their post/comment history. Somtimes it’s pretty obvious. It’ll be something like a 2 week old accouunt with tons of comments with the majority being in the double-digits downvotes, and the comments will use insults or insinuate things. They’ll also have lots of deleted comments in the mod log.
Yeah I tried in a few cases, it might have worked once. And also, if they continue, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re trolls, they could just antisocial assholes.
Anyway, I think your comment has great advice and it should be used as an example on how to deal with unpleasant users. Seriously, thank you for your reply. I will try to apply your advice in the future.
If it’s not fun then why are you arguing? You have the option to disengage. Every space doesn’t have to be for you. If it’s not something reportable, just let people have their fun, even that guy with the thorns in his comments.
I don’t understand your comment.
You mean, let the trolls antagonize people for fun and create an unpleasant experience for everybody?