A Democratic Multitude - alt.society.anarchy

Message from discussion A Democratic Multitude

Russil Wvong

More options Dec 13 2002, 9:16 pm

Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc, alt.activism, alt.fan.noam-chomsky, alt.society.anarchy, alt.anarchism, alt.politics.radical-left, alt.politics.socialism

From: russilwv...@yahoo.com (Russil Wvong)

Date: 13 Dec 2002 18:16:15 -0800

Local: Fri, Dec 13 2002 9:16 pm

Subject: Re: A Democratic Multitude

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dgrae...@rcn.net (David Graeber) wrote:
> > russilwv...@yahoo.com (Russil Wvong) wrote:
> > > David, I think there's a fundamental misconception here about how
> > > to prevent flamewars. It is *not* possible to deal with trolling
> > > and flamewars by criticism and condemnation. If you don't want a
> > > group to be ruined by flamewars, the only effective response,
> > > short of moderation, is to *not get into flamewars*, whether with
> > > trolls or anyone else.

> Well, this is one possible approach. I did this
> for years with James Donald - I simply killfiled
> him and refused to look at his endless attacks on
> me, and tried to encourage everyone else to simply
> act as if he wasn't there. It would work for a short
> while but then new people were always coming, and
> when you have someone continually, endlessly
> trying to goad people into answering back by throwing
> abusive lies at them, eventually, some of those
> new people, however much they were warned, will
> do so, and then everyone gets drawn in.

I'm afraid this is the nature of Usenet. Flamewars happen. What I'm
saying is that criticism, retaliation, and escalation only aggravate
the problem. I'm thinking of your earlier references to Oliver
receiving "his comeuppance" and "a taste of his own medicine". If
you think unfounded accusations are wrong, I don't see why you think
they're justified as retaliation. It's also not always easy for a
bystander to tell who started it.

I don't mean this as a personal attack, by the way. Flamewars *are*
definitely aggravating. I'm just suggesting, based on past experience,
that your ideas on how to prevent them -- ideas that might very well
work in a face-to-face setting -- will not work on Usenet.

The nature of newsgroups is that (a) they're public, (b) it's very easy
to post to them, and (c) they're semi-anonymous. In this kind of
environment, establishing effective social controls is extremely
difficult. You're never going to be able to get agreement from everyone
on alt.fan.noam-chomsky to ignore Oliver Kamm. Some of us don't think
his sins deserve total ostracization, and as you say, newcomers arrive
every day.

You can *suggest* to newcomers that they not get involved in flamewars,
and that they avoid responding to Oliver if he insults them or condescends
to them -- you may want to set up a web page and put a link to it at
the bottom of each of your postings, as I've done with the
alt.politics.international guidelines. But that's not going to guarantee
that flamewars won't happen. alt.fan.noam-chomsky is never going to have
the cozy atmosphere of a debating society.

One further suggestion: *avoid cross-posting*. Cross-posting tends
to aggravate flamewars, by melding multiple newsgroups into one big
unhappy dysfunctional newsgroup.

> Still, if other posters did not treat trolls as
> honest interlocutors then it would be much easier
> to get others to simply ignore them.

I'm afraid newsgroups are simply too heterogeneous to get consensus on
whether a particular person should be completely ostracized or not.
And long meta-discussions which attempt to reach such a consensus
(such as this one!) can be just as unproductive as flamewars.

> I appreciate the reasonable tone.

I always try to be "relentlessly reasonable", as djinn put it. :-)

Russil Wvong
Vancouver, Canada
alt.politics.international FAQ: www.geocities.com/rwvong/future/apifaq.html

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