Do Not Feed the Troll
Online fora put social pressure on people who argue with trolls, not the trolls themselves. For example, I have no influence over professional anti-Linux FUD-mongers, but I can mock Jonathan Corbet at LWN.net for linking to them. Groklaw and Slashdot posters also disreputate troll-feeders.
The distributed online forum called "blogs" is slowly reinventing all the features that the distributed online forum called "Usenet" invented 20 years ago. Who will reinvent "kill thread" for the RSS aggregator?
If as an author and potential "troll feeder" you knew that readers had the ability to Kill Thread, you'd be less likely to link into a tar pit of rehashed arguments -- since some of your readers would already have ignored it.
--
Don Marti
<dmarti@zgp.org>
