I was dealing with some trolling in blog comments awhile ago and someone sent me an email of support, appreciating my patience in my responses to the troll. The standard advice is “Don’t feed the trolls,” but usually here it seems to have worked well to give polite but firm and focused responses. One reason for this is that this is a blog, not twitter, so a troll can’t get hundreds or thousands here of “likes” for just expressing an opinion; instead, there’s room in comments for all sides to make their arguments. So often we get the best possible outcome: the would-be troll gets to make his point at whatever length he wants, others can respond, and the discussion is out there. Polite but firm responses take some of the thrills out of trolling; the people who really want to up the emotional level can go to twitter or 4chan.
Occasionally, though, a troll keeps coming back and making the same point over and over again, with a combination of rudeness, repetition, and lack of content that degrades the discussion, and I have to ask the troll to stop, or, with very rare necessity, to block him from commenting.
The semi-bluff
In poker, a “semi-bluff” is when you bluff, but your hand has some potential for improvement, so if you get called on it, you still have a possible out. I get the impression that the occasional trolling commenters here are engaged in a sort of semi-trolling. On one hand, they want to provoke strong reactions, and I get the impression they see themselves as charming, if not completely house-trained, gadflies or imps. So they can keep looping around the same refuted points over and over again on the ha-ha-troll theory that the rest of us have no sense of perspective. At the same time, they seem to sincerely believe in the deep truth of whatever he happens to be saying. (I’m guessing that even flat-out data fabricators, liars, and hacks believe that, in some deep sense, they’re serving a good cause.) So they’re kinda trolling but also are being sincere at some level.
The disturbing thing is that, frequent blog targets such as plagiarists, nudgelords, pizzagate proponents, sloppy pundits, confused popularizers, etc., probably see me as this kind of troll! I keep banging on and on and never give up. That horse thing. That Javert thing.
As is often the case, I’m stuck here in the pluralist’s dilemma. There’s no logical way to criticize trolls in general without entering the vortex and calling into question my own work that is getting trolled. Cantor or Russell would understand.
Andrew –
> There’s no logical way to criticize trolls in general without entering the vortex and calling into question my own work that is getting trolled.
As someone who has been called a troll a time or two in my day, I think it’s possible to break down the category of “troll.”
I think often definition of who it isn’t a troll is pretty subjective or arbitrary, not in the sense of being random but in the sense of being based on personal perspective.
Generally, it’s supposed to mean someone who’s only goal is to disrupt the discourse or “distract” people from focusing on a perspective the troll doesn’t agree with. But often that’s not really the case, and a “troll” is someone who expresses opinions that go against the grain – often persistently.
As to the motivation of people who get called trolls. Sometimes it seems their goal is merely to annoy. Or maybe it’s just an obsessiveness or a kind of addiction. But I think sometimes people who get called trolls are insistent about actually trying to engage – and mostly called a troll by people who are resister to engagement and just want to remain comfortable in their echo chamber.
I agree. “Troll” covers a lot of ground – so much that I don’t think I can define it. It could be someone you (I) disagree with, someone who intends to disrupt (as always, proving intention is very difficult), someone who likes to hear themselves even if they having little or nothing to contribute (don’t we all?), someone who is sufficiently ill-informed but persistent to the point of interfering with the discussion, someone who insists on disagreeing as a matter of principle, or someone who always must have the last word even if there is no value added. I would say that I can’t define trolling, but I know it when I see it.
Dale –
I agree with your agreement! The one thing I pick up on there is “interfering with the discussion.” That one usually bugs me, as I’ve been accused of trying to interfere, or to “distract,” with often the additional attached complaint that “You’re wasting my time.” So first of all, I know that it’s just not true that I want to interfere or to distract. But further, I don’t think I can waste someone’s time by writing comments. They are choosing whether or not to spend time reading my comments. At least in this context, I don’t have the power to waste someone else’s time!
My favorite is when people repeatedly, take the time to read and respond to my comments only to add that I’m wasting their time (or that I’m distracting them). There’s a real underling problem there with accountability, imo.
It can still take time to scroll down past comments, and trolls who just try to fill up the comment space can waste a lot of your time that way.
Wonks –
I would take issue that it takes a lot of time to stroll past comments. A few seconds? Maybe? If someone shows on my radar as a troll, I just scroll past their comments as soon as I see who has written them. In I would imagine less than a second. It only feels like a lot of time, imo, of I take the time to read someone’s comments. In which case I’m the one responsible, especially if it’s someone that I think regularly posts useless comments.
I object to the basic notion that “trolls” should be moderated out because they waste people’s time or “distract” them. In my observation that notion usually, fundamentally mistakes who really has the agency, and is mostly a function of group think and identity-based cognition. If the blog proprietor thinks they’re obnoxious or an asshole and doesn’t want them posting on their blog that seems just fine to me. Send them a signal and get rid of them. But I don’t think other rationale usually stands up to scrutiny.
Joshua:
I think your last paragraph describes my situation with the various researchers and science popularizers I’ve criticized over the years on this blog. I’d love for them to engage in serious discussion, but the usual behavior is to just ignore outside criticisms from myself and others or to insult us (“Stasi,” “terrorists,” etc.) or to attack but without addressing the actual criticisms (see for example here). I can see how outside critics, including me, frustrate these people; in turn I’m frustrated because they will seem to do almost anything other than to consider that they may have made scientific mistakes.
In contrast, the trolls on this blog have either been people who repeatedly comment on irrelevant topics, use abusive language, push toxic conspiracy theories, or make false statements and continue to do so even when other commenters have pointed this out. This is only a very tiny proportion of our commenters! A little bit of trolling can be ok, as it keeps us all on our toes, and a troll can make good points too. On very rare occasions trolls seem to be actively degrading the discourse in the comment section, and then I ask them to stop.
So, I do think these two scenarios are different. It’s just hard to precisely draw the line.
Andrew –
I think you do an excellent job of handling comments at your blog. Compared to other blogs I’ve frequented over the years, there’s very little “trolling,” and there’s broadly a very high degree of signal to noise, and good faith engagement even among people who are in disagreement. I don’t think that’s some kind of statistical fluke.
In part, I think it’s because of the degree to which there’s a technical focus. Disagreements about arcane (no judgement there) statistical methodology is likely to have a kind of self-selecting exclusion mechanism. Even where technically focused blogs on something like physics might get a lot of cranks, I suspect for some reason (it might be interesting to speculate) statistics as a field isn’t likely to get a lot of cranks. Even though there’s often a lot of crossover to topics that would often attract trolling (say vaccine efficacy), I think there’s a carry-over effect from the more technical overlay.
But there are other critical parts, IM). One is directly related to your style (and following from that of the other contributors) when writing top line posts. It kind of goes back to what we were discussing elsewhere. The posts here generally do what I call “engaging with the naysayer.” That kind of stylistically weeds out “trolls” because you’ve in a sense proactively addressed people who just want to bang on a drum. I also think your obvious intellectual depth is going to intimidate all but the boldest of trolls. Finally, I think your method for dealing with trolls is perfect. You let them talk themselves out to a degree. And then you address them directly and openly.
I agree it’s hard to draw the line but I think you do it very skillfully.
What you are describing sounds more like “sea lioning”.
True trolls humorously and succinctly allude to elephants in the room, that can often only be seen when you set up a joke with an outcome that makes the elephant obvious.
A classic example is the heckler that responded to JL Austin’s claim that no language uses a double positive as negative by exclaiming, “Yeah, yeah”.
Your Derek Jeter / preregistration quip is another. It is a “mic drop” that makes plain the insufficiency of preregistration.
Yes, while it’s not that important that a word retain its original meaning, classic “trolling”—a word borrowed from fishing (I think)—is a way to attract interaction on social media by using veiled sarcasm (so only some readers get the joke) or saying something that’s “true” but that some people won’t be able to resist clarifying or correcting. (The best example I’ve seen of the latter, which leads to endless arguments, is “Women and people from minority ethnic backgrounds make up the majority of the Trump coalition.”)
The Phil Hendry radio show in the 1990s was trolling avant la lettre. Worth looking up.
(Sorry) But it is certainly also the case that relentlessly argumentative blog commenters have become known as “trolls”
Kyle –
> a word borrowed from fishing (I think)
Interesting. I always thought it’s origin was from the “trolls” that live under bridges and hassle people who walk by. So what’s the direction, did trolling come from trolls or do trolls come from trolling? Now that I think about it, I’m thinking that you’ve prolly got it right.
Yes. Trolling is a kind of fishing where you drag a bait or lure. Sometimes you add a “flasher” to the leader to draw fishes’ attention to the bait.
I know nothing about the game of poker and less about managing a blog, but I am aware that a sentence such as:
“I have to ask the troll to stop, or, with very rare necessity, to block him from commenting”
can be viewed as (inverse?) male sexism. That is, once again, the default condition excludes females. Changing the quotation to
“I have to ask the troll to stop, or, with very rare necessity, to block him or her from commenting” is, on the other hand, clumsy and ugly.
Better, perhaps, is to put it this way:
“I have to ask the troll to stop, or, with very rare necessity, to block the individual from commenting.” Although this fix might work in English, once this blog is (machine?) translated/ expanded into other languages, the problem may still exist because the noun, “individual,” might require an ending to indicate gender, default or otherwise. Life was simpler in the good old days.
“I have to ask the troll to stop, or, with very rare necessity, to block them from commenting”.
Them as third person singular has a long history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
I’m slowly coming around to using plural pronouns for this kind of sentence: “to block them from commenting,” but only reluctantly.
Our host joins writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and C.S. Lewis, who used “singular they.”
I read a book (Too Like the Lightning) where the default pronoun for people was they/them, and only a few characters used he/him or she/her. It felt weird to read in the beginning but started to make sense and feel natural partway through. After a while I didn’t even notice. It was actually easier to get used to “everyone is they/them” than the (unrelated) books I’ve read where every character was he/him or she/her. (The Left Hand of Darkness, Ancillary Justice)
Many years ago there was an NPR piece that involved language somehow, and someone made the point that English is an impoverished language compared to many others; there’s stuff we just cannot easily say, we don’t have the words for it. I’ve heard people argue that that’s a strength, there’s less that you have to learn in order to be fully fluent, but that really seems like sour grapes: what, it’s somehow a good thing that there are things that are hard for us to express?
We have a great example here. We don’t have a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun! WTF! In this particular case — “I have to block them from commenting” — using ‘they’ to refer to an individual is unambiguous. But there are plenty of cases in which it can be confusing.
Everyone uses the singular ‘they.’ As someone-or-other famously pointed out, if you’re driving and someone cuts in front of you, you don’t exclaim to your passenger “Did you see that? He or she cut me off!”
But the fact that there are some cases in which the singular ‘they’ is fine, there are other cases in which it’s confusing. I hope that in the fullness of time English will adopt some new words so we can avoid constructions like ‘he or she’, and can avoid confusion about whether a particular use of ‘they’ refers to ‘this person’ or ‘that group’.
Regular readers of this blog might enjoy Language Log https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/, which is similar to this one in many ways (e.g. dedicated, technical clientele). They have a lot to say about “singular they” https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=singular+they . I also like their term “breakfast experiment”, which is a quick computational exploration of some linguistic question that you can do over breakfast: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=breakfast+experiment )
Ben:
It’s on our links page!
“You” as a pronoun is just as ambiguous, though unlike “they” we have more options in English to get around it. “One” for generic person, “y’all” or “youse” for plural, etc.
I don’t think that
trolls here : Andrew :: Andrew : plagiarists and nudgelords
is correct — Andrew’s comments are far too reasonable and sensible — but even if true, a key difference is that the trolls hear are posting on *Andrew’s* site, in which case it is very reasonable for Andrew to impose whatever standards he wants and block whoever he wants. I’ve often thought that our host is far more patient and generous than I would be!
To some extent, this seems to be a lack of moderation tools in most blogging software.
Ideally, with at most a few keystrokes, moderator could
0) Accept a post
1) delete a post entirely, but more often:
2) Move it out of the thread into a separate place (as some people have done), leaving poster’s handle, reason code, and link to actual comment.
Thoughtful people assess people’s comments to build credibility models, but if troll comments just disappear, that can remove useful information.
I’ve been arguing for this for decade+, based on public online experience since 1985
https://retractionwatch.com/2013/01/13/an-word-about-the-retraction-watch-comments-policy/
Perhaps its worth ignoring for a moment the apparent irrationality of the nudgelords and instead thinking of them as a group of people with a set of norms etc that they are disinclined to give up. I overwhelmingly agree with most of your scientific criticisms of these folks, but you don’t seem to have cracked the case on why they don’t just leave the dark side and come over to the side of light. As you said, they view you as a troll. I wonder if that could give you any insite as to how “trolls” here might view you, and if it’s possible that they might be communicating something worthwhile that you are missing, just as you are communicating something worthwhile that the nudgelords are missing. Is it just the nudgelords that have blind spots, or can you have them too?
One blind spot I noticed recently was your insistence that listening to podcasts while riding a bike is the same as listening to podcasts while driving a car.
It’s not: people driving cars are watching out for other people driving cars – not for people on bikes. IOW, you are much less visible on a bike and for that reason alone, your rection time is critical – any instant of distraction could have serious consequences. And of course there is another more obvious problem: the bike provides you with virtually no protection in an accident, while a car affords substantial protection in an accident. IOW, the consequences for you are much worse than for a car driver if an instant of distraction causes an accident.
So that is a blind spot.
I’m not sure how to get the nudgelords to shine a light into their blind spots and see what’s going on, and I feel the same about some of the writing here, both in the posts and the comments.
when are you coming home? Why don’t you ever call?
chipmunk –
> I wonder if that could give you any insite as to how “trolls” here might view you, and if it’s possible that they might be communicating something worthwhile that you are missing,…
I think Andrew considers that possibility carefully. Sometimes he might miss the mark, but I think he’s a pretty good shot.
It would be good if you could provide an example of where you think he wrongly dismissed someone as a troll – but from what I’ve seen when he does so, it’s not merely because (or even usually in association with) they’ve expressed views different from his own.
My “prior” here is that he has so few “trolls” at this blog pretty much precisely because he does as you suggest. I happen to think that the blogs where moderation is the least capricious or mercurial or arbitrary, or most transparent or consistent with a clear standard such as you suggest are the ones which attract the fewest trolls.
Joshua:
Yes, just to follow up on this: I’m very happy to have commenters who disagree with me! When people commented that they didn’t think I should listen to podcasts while biking (even using a speaker, no headphones!), I didn’t conclude that these commenters were trolls. I disagreed with their comments, and that’s fine. Open disagreement can be good.
When I’m talking about trolls, I’m talking about people who go out of their way to be annoying or abusive in some way or another, without that counterbalanced by any valuable content. Plain old disagreement, that’s no problem at all.
On the other hand, you can learn a lot about what leads to trolling from blogs where there are many of them. Marginal Revolution has many trolls. I believe it is due to two things: first, there is virtually no moderation or feedback from the authors of the blog, and second, the trolls are doing similar things to the authors themselves. They like to provoke for its own sake, and they attract commentators like themselves. Needless to say, I don’t find either of these features on this blog (Andrew does not appear to moderate, but actively provides feedback).
Dale
> I believe it is due to two things: first, there is virtually no moderation or feedback from the authors of the blog, and second, the trolls are doing similar things to the authors themselves. They like to provoke for its own sake, and they attract commentators like themselves.
Based on my observations, I tend to doubt the first reason you speculated about. I’ve seen plenty of blogs where there’s both heavy moderation and a lot of trolls. My own belief is that it’s the second dynamic that is more likely causal. I think the number of trolls tends to reflect characteristics of the blog proprietor. And so it’s then interesting to break down which blog proprietor characteristics correlate with a high troll factor.
Dale, Joshua:
Compared to Marginal Revolution, I see three differences:
1. My audience is about 1/10 the size (at least, that’s my guess, I don’t really know).
2. I respond to many comments directly (it beats working!).
3. I write on much less contentious topics. Cowen in particular seems to like throwing out red meat to his far-right trolls, but phrasing it as “most of you will not like to hear this” or something like that, with the implication that his audience is mostly center-left. I’m not quite sure how that works. I guess that most of our audience here is on the left, but I’m mostly writing about statistics and general social science, and even when political issues come up I’m not usually taking any contentious positions.
I’m guessing that #3 is the main reason we don’t get much trolling in comments here. But #1 and #2 must be part of the story too. With fewer readers, it makes sense that we have fewer commenters of all types; also, the audience is smaller so there’s less of a motivation for trolling. As I sometimes tell wannabe trolls here, if you want that kind of fun, you’re better off somewhere like twitter or 4chan where you can really get into it.