Troll-friendly

    From Consumerium development wiki R&D Wiki
    Revision as of 11:20, 16 August 2004 by Jukeboksi (talk | contribs) (rm broken and confusing link, this seems to leave the sentence broken still)

    A troll-friendly system or social software-based service (like the opinion wiki or this R&D wiki) assumes that built trust is very low, found trust is very high, and that grown trust will not happen unless a degree of politics as usual is allowed to apply in that system. This seems to be one motivation for proposing explicit faction support.

    For consumerium, this means sysops should not push their luck or assume they are in charge of every faction or can resolve political dispute when people devote their lives to that in the real world and fail. In the long term it means that the Consumerium social club shouldn't over-ride consensus rules. It pays to push this process out to user-land. But it also means that the consensus has to form on the basis of strict due process that in the long term will support a reliable Consumerium buying signal. Low-integrity editors must be "driven off":

    When someone has actively participated in building a sysop power structure that engages in ad hominem revert, ad hominem delete, witch-hunt, inquisitor, psychiatry, libel and echo chamber tactics, under the same identity, they should be actively driven off by trolls, and good riddance. If they wish this not to happen, they should make a new identity, and change their behaviour under the old one on any large public wiki where they are known for this inexcusable sysop vandalism - probably also giving up any position in the sysop power structure as well. If they do all this and become an advocate for true soft security at least in cases other than simple vandalism, and become widely known for changing their spots, at that point, it is the obligation of any troll-friendly wiki to not only accept them back, but honour their conversion to the ways of trolls...

    Usage of this phrase is very common:

    • "We also have troll friendly proxies," - brawl-hall.com
    • "VT is definitely a troll-friendly environment, but I make a habit

    of using the report option when they get too far out of line." - re: VersionTracker

    • " Fanhome is a Troll friendly environment. ... Yet here you are. Like I said,

    Fanhome is Troll-friendly." - Vancouver Canucks "FanHome" site

    Some services say as explicit matter of policy that they are not troll-friendly. For instance, Wikipedia goes on wiki witchhunts against presumed trolls who question its sysop power structure. The term troll-friendly is quite common:

    Troll-friendly wiki management practices are designed to accomodate the New Troll point of view as much as possible. Rather than attempting to classify, categorize, restrict and challenge what trolls do, it attempts instead to engage them using political virtues:

    • prudence,
    • conciliation,
    • compromise,
    • variety,
    • adaptability, and
    • liveliness.

    These democratic values were listed by Bernard Crick as alternatives to ideology or any "absolute-sounding ethic".

    Very tellingly, "This article is a stub" at Wikipedia. This will not surprise anyone familiar with their GodKing or sysop power structure, which lacks very considerably in these virtues.