Comment by jasonvorhe
8 days ago
This reductionist way of thinking isn't doing you or anyone any good. Unless you have at least some circumstantial evidence hinting at that, apart from "someone disagrees with me so they must be x", this isn't providing any value to the discussion.
You should probably address your criticisms to the gp. Giving trolls a pass and wagging fingers at people who reject their specious arguments is an increasingly common failure pattern.
Trolls don't get a pass. But neither do their critics.
You want to criticize a troll? Be my guest. Criticize away. (Or just downvote and flag.) But if you criticize, do better than false accusation. (There's a fine real accusation to make, namely "you're being a troll"; you don't have to make false accusations.)
Be better than the trolls. Don't stoop to their level.
I really think people can distinguish between a formal accusation and snark.
Now, I agree that in febrile political environments it's better not to rely on sarcasm and satire for communication because it imposes extra cognitive overhead and is subject to misinterpretation, but at the same time 'found the [negative stereotype]' is such a common joke format in American popular culture that it would be foolish to take it literally. It's like objecting to a 'knock knock' joke by complaining that the person is lying about being on the other side of a door.
And putting trolls and their critics on the same level is fundamentally foolish, and a much worse example of feeding trolls. It means attacking the critics for paying the trolls back in their own coin, which inevitably leads to a ratchet effect in favor of the trolls. There's good evidence that being rude to trolls is the most effective way for an online community to maintain itself: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03697
Their reasoning was "well google also has bugs", comparing their bounty system to an embarrassing security mistake.