The Proverbs 26 Troll, or,
Towards a Grand Unified Semi-Coherent Theory of Comment Management
~being Yet Another in the siding line of posts begun a while back and delayed due to my accident~
A few weeks ago I brought the banhammer down only for the second time ever (deliberately annoying people until they go away doesn't count) as my stated and default policy is to let people say whatever they want and sort it out with half-bricks and smashed bottles amongst themselves - er, I mean, discuss things in reasonable and mild tones suited to a drawing room, of course... Seriously, I tend to think that even the incorrigibly stupid, or the incorrigibly intellectually-dishonest, like jordan, can provide endless hours of amusement, like catnip mice ahem piñata-like fun for young & old useful opportunities for debaters to hone their skills and gain familiarity with sundry annoying rhetorical devices, or just blow off some steam, without costing me anything, so why should I play Overzealous Soccer Mom/Uppercrust Society Hostess? Life's too short!
Besides, we're all grownups here, so to speak - you're old enough to play tag with the big kids, you're old enough to deal with scraped knees like the rest of us. "Waeeeaaeeeaaah!!! S/he called me a stoopidhead!!!!" isn't something I particularly ever liked dealing with IRL, finding it tedious beyond words, and bored/annoyed P@L is not much fun for anyone, since I can almost always think of even more scathing things to call you, thus explaining my basic laissez-faire comments moderation non-policy, comprised of equal parts Give 'em enough rope commitment to free speech and complete selfish laziness principled tolerance. The only other guy ever banned, we banned - and I say "we" advisedly - after a Betan Vote in which nobody at all spoke up for him, and quite a few people appealed to have him kicked out. So why didn't I wait and give the ubiquitous fandom commenter known as Rational Madman or RMM the opportunity to be sent to Coventry in the same way?
The answer lies in that adjective, 'ubiquitous,' - but I intend to use this as an opportunity to expound my time-seasoned theory of comments management, which I have been able to more fully develop over the last few months, and which may be useful to others in not just dealing with, but conceptualizing their own systems of dealing with, the problem of what I have dubbed "the Control Troll."
I've never been happy with the stock pat advice to just "ignore them and they'll go away," when it comes to trolls - for one thing, it never worked as advice IRL when dealing with sexual harassers, and I haven't seen turning turtle to work online either - and for another thing, it seems to be born out of a combination of equal parts apathy and cowardice, the reinforcement of the Status Quo by those who aren't currently suffering from it. OTOH, I've seen the effort of trying to moderate comments send bloggers nigh round the bend, and part of the stress of it is the problem, imo, of having no coherent ethical paradigm to work from, which creates intellectual and moral strain in trying to feel out an internally-coherent and defensible strategy for coping with online strife. ("Children, Be Nice!" is not an ethical paradigm, sorry!)
I've also never been happy with the simplistic lumping of all kinds of online hostilities into one collective pile marked "Troll," (likewise "Flameage," as I have ranted about all hither and yon for many years) and being blessed and cursed with an analytical mind for as long as I can remember, trying to sort out and band the various strains of Trollery was a natural development. After all, if you're trying to deal with one kind of garden pest, using a remedy intended for another species won't get you very far, necessarily. (My interest in this goes back to the days of Usenet, when a kind of primitive spamblocking setup called a "killfile" was the way most people dealt with flamewars and annoying posters who wouldn't give up, a system which wasn't terribly efficient and which resulted in lots of false positives as well as efforts to get around the banned terms, but was the best that most coms could do in those Wild West days of the internet.)
The evolution of the term "Concern Troll" in the political blogosphere a couple years ago was a great step forward in understanding the dynamics of combat rhetoric (not limited to online dialectic either) and while watching the antics of RMM in fandom and a number of other similar operators infesting feminist blogs elsewhere (they do seem to be overrepresented among Male Chauvinist Pigs, although not all of them are XY) I came up with the term "Control Troll" to distinguish a somewhat different phenomenon.
Now, mind you, no categories are absolute - there is going to be overlap, often considerable, as these are equally tactics, and personality types. But understanding and identifying if one is dealing with a Control Troll - IRL as well as online - can forestall lots of exhausting, self-defeating, and crazy-making efforts at reasonableness with the willfully irrational aka intellectually dishonest, just as being able to spot a Concern Troll at fifty paces will allow you to aim precisely at his spurious empathy and discredit him before the eyes of the multitude.
It's important also to make the distinction between "Trollery" and "People Being Annoying To Me" - one is (more or less) objective, the other completely subjective - just as there is a difference between "Flaming" and "People Being Mean To Me", so right off I am going to limit the definition of "Troll" to someone who is not arguing in good faith. This is not the "classic" definition of Troll, but you know what? There really aren't very many "classic" Usenet trolls out there, the sort of Beavis-Butthead-Parker-Stone-hipster who doesn't care about anything and is just madly tossing golden apples around to start fights for the fun of watching people get mad and argue passionately online. And I never saw many of them, in action, either.
What I did, and do, see a lot of are people who may be annoying as hell, and masters of BS, and wasting of everyone's time, but they're that way because they're True Believers in their Cause, and they just can't shut up and go away, even for a moment. Thus the endless G*N threads on the rec.arts groups, thus the posters who get troll-rated even by people who agree with them on Daily Kos, for endlessly spamming diaries with links to their particular grinding-axes - and the problem is not a lack of seriousness (nor the converse, too much seriousness) but a lack of good-faith engagement. It's someone trying to scream so loud - like a two-year-old on a shrieking binge - that nobody else can be heard over the din, and thus the phrase "Control Troll" was born in my mind.
Concern Trolls are more subtle, and more apparently reasonable - at least at first. The true dividing line between Concern Troll and Control Troll is the respective PPH, or posts per hour frequency, and it doesn't take much at all for your standard Concern Troll to slip right over it. This is where my other, crueller term in the title comes from, the Proverbs 26** Troll, which itself is an arch jab at the inevitably-abridged Rule for Good Women which gets shorthanded in Evangelical Christian circles as "The Proverbs 31 Woman" or often, "more precious than rubies" - a little unfair to our canine companions, as those of us with cats to our dismay can attest, but a vivid image nonetheless.
Since the Control Troll isn't there to engage in dialogue, but to drown out conversation and make dialogue impossible so as to "win" the debate as per his definition of "winning," which means making everyone else shut up and go away out of exhaustion, and then claiming to have proven his point (which is nuts, but there you have it) and is thereby pretty much indefatigable (ie if they give up and go away, they weren't really Control Trolls) the whole question of allowing him to shriek unabated becomes itself a moral issue, and that's where things get sticky for proponents of freedom of speech.
Now, all along*** my ethical model for questions of censorship has been based on J.S. Mill's discussion of speech as a deed involving responsibility - and context! - so that, going beyond the simplistic "shouting fire in crowded theatre" parallel, you get into nuanced questions of the exact same words not having the exact same meaning, depending on who and where and when and in what context they are said (the specific example, paraphrased from memory, being the difference between someone grumpily saying something like "Fucking stockbrokers should all be shot," in a bar, not meaning it seriously, and someone standing in front of a stockbroker's house working up a pitchfork-and-torchbearing mob to go in and string up the stockbroker right then and there) and this making a difference, but the presumption being that overall the PTB should always err on the side of greater liberty, as conducive to working-out of truth, than on the side of Order, heavy-handed.
But then you get the Control Trolls, and how do you reconcile the principles of Liberty and Order?
Every case is different, of course, but I don't think it's that difficult, and I'm going to set out to provide a clear and relatively simple paradigm for bloggers and community moderators to use, when making these calls.
--First, of course, I'm going to provide a bad example of how to do it.
I. "It's my party, I can ban if I want to" - the Flaky Householder Model
This is what you usually hear from people trying to articulate a defense of comment moderation or banning - the claim that a blog is like a private home, and the owner of said home has the right to set whatever house rules she or he feels like, totally arbitrarily, and no body has the right to question them - an Englishman's Home Is His Castle And All That.
Now, technically, that is true (at least functionally, within limits, given that most people don't own but rather rent their servers) - the same way that it's true that you can believe that the lunar landing was faked on a soundstage, or stuff beans up your nose, or insist on talking only in pig-latin, and nobody can stop you. It's a free universe, after all, at least until you start running up against the laws of physics.
It doesn't mean it's a good idea, or a sound defense, or that you don't come out of making it failing to look like a nitwit.
I mean, you can - IRL - insist on your visitors removing their shoes and assume that they will intuit this responsibility by virtue of some osmotic process begun by walking in the door and shout at them when they don't (I am speaking of a typical Northeast American house with linoleum and carpet, btw, not a Japanese home with tatami floors), then yell at them for sitting on the sofas which are too special and fancy for ordinary mortal buttocks to press under ordinary circumstances, but not marked with any sort of device indicating that they are Off Limits, tell them that they can help themselves to anything they want in the fridge and then jump all over them for taking things they were not supposed to take or for using servingware that was likewise Too Special To Use, but not set aside anyhow, and then get all hot and bothered that they don't seem comfortable and at ease and that they keep making noises about how they have to leave soon, and how they never come to visit anyway, they should sit down and stay a while. (I wish I was making any of these incidents up, but I'm not. People don't always outgrow this "you have to play just the games I want to play because you're staying at MY house" mentality just because they've passed puberty and legal adulthood, unfortunately.)
You have every right to do this, as a householder.
What you don't have, is every right to do this, and then be pissed off when nobody wants to visit you. What you don't have is the right to do this, and to expect that everyone else will understand and sympathize with your idiosyncratic, autocratic behaviors. Or that they won't walk out the door and go "What a jerk! I can't STAND her! Magna Mater, could there be a worse inversion of the model of hospitality on the face of the earth?"
Coz you're being a complete and utter prat, and the fact that you have the earthly right to doesn't change that one bit.
And that's what you're claiming for your role, when you say "It's my blog, I make the rules, I don't have to explain them or be consistent or ANYFING cos its MINEMINEMINE!!!1! NYEAH!!!1!" I mean, if that's the self you want to present to the world, be my guest - but don't expect any respect for it, sorry.
II. "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service" - the Responsible Proprietor Model
The really odd thing about claiming "private home" status for a blog is that, well, you know, most homes don't open onto the street so that total strangers can walk in and sit down and have dinner with you, or watch your TV in your living room. In fact, even if you're broiling spareribs in your backyard, with a cooler full of drinks and help yourself, strangers still don't get to walk in and help themselves and join in the conversation uninvited - it's called "crashing," aka "trespassing," and gatecrashers who get caught don't usually get told to pull up a chair and join the family. There's a name for places like that, where total strangers can walk into an establishment and sit down and stay a while without being personally known to the owners, and it's pub, short for "public house."
Now, just because a place is open to the public, doesn't mean that "Anything Goes" - au contraire. The ancient and honorable institution of the Bouncer is there to make sure that it doesn't, in fact.
Even in the tamer sphere of the restaurant, where intangible social pressure is principally relied on to keep the peace, there are rules that must be followed, and penalties that must be paid, if they are broken.
And they are there for good reason, even if some of them are arbitrary and localized, per the owners or per regional custom, because the success of the establishment depends on an overall good experience being had by a majority, and this means that the proverbial arm-swinging must stop before nose-encountering, even if this does curtail the pleasure of those who just want to swing their arms randomly. This can mean that dogs aren't allowed inside, or that people are required to meet certain minimum clothing standards, or that guns are not allowed (this is the case in bars in Dallas, iirc) or that certain forms of conduct must be maintained, and others eschewed, to retain the privilege of being a paying customer.
This is not arbitrary discrimination, even though for example, in another country dogs might be allowed in pubs, or shoes unimportant at a beachside eatery, or table-dancing encouraged at a particularly vivacious venue. Yes, there is a certain conformist pressure, but it is inevitably a very mild one, because if it were too onerous people would not go there (see our Flaky Householder above) - unless, to be sure, the establishment is striving for an atmosphere of Exclusivity and is actively trying to drive away custom to this end, which is hardly the usual condition!
Let us take, for instance, the hypothetical Neighborhood Watering Hole which happens to unfortunately have for a neighbor a Crazy Screaming Guy. Maybe you have one in your area, maybe you're lucky. At any rate, Crazy Screaming Guy will, if allowed, wander into the place and start screaming about Fluoride and Aliens and the Second Coming and Satanic Barcodes and he won't stop. You can't shut him up by buying him a drink. You can't do anything with Crazy Screaming Guy, except put your fingers in your ears - or kick him out.
So do you, as the proprietor, allow Crazy Screaming Guy to go from table to table, interrupting your customers' lunches with his rants about Purity of Essence and demands for free tinfoil?
Or are you under an ethical obligation, having encouraged them to come within your walls as a refuge from the world, to protect them from Crazy Screaming Guy's harassment? Even if you think Crazy Screaming Guy's the funniest thing in the world, or even if you think he's right - or if he's your brother and you don't want to get your mom angry at you for not letting him come in and drive away your patrons with his unwashed shrieking? (By which last I refer to the alas-too-common phenomenon of moderators who let their BFFs get away with all kinds of shit, while riding micromanaging-kindergarten-teacher herd on everyone else. You know the type, if only from fourth grade...)
I would argue that, as the proprietor of a virtual establishment - and that is what the host of a blog-with-comments is, only an flocked blog would count as a private home - one in fact has a duty to not let the Crazy Screaming Guys run amok in your chophouse. Even though most of us run fairly loose joints, with BYOB policies and open mike nite every day of the week, we still are the ones with the bouncers' stool, in the end, and the phone by the tap to call the cops.
And I'd seen, in the previous month or so, more than enough evidence to tell me that RMM was a Crazy Screaming Guy and make that call, within one day, without putting it to a Betan Vote. I'd never once seen him engage in anything like an honest, good-faith attempt at debate, and I'd seen ample evidence of him being an insanely-obsessive, utterly-dishonest little creep (and I'm being nice, mind you) all over the fannish blogosphere, monomaniacal on the subject of feminism, a living embodiment of "anxious masculinity", and I had another factor to consider beyond the whole boring/funny troll question, and the annoyance-to-regulars, and that was the animal behavior problem.
Longtimers know that a lot of my attitudes towards dealing with fellow humans have been shaped by my firsthand experiences as well as reading of others' experiences with dogs and horses - big social animals capable of doing not insignificant amounts of damage to each other and bystanders and themselves, with highly-developed emotional awareness and sensitivity, and powerfully ambitious for social advancement in-group. To put it another way, If I wouldn't take this from a thousand-pound animal with four-inch teeth, I'm sure as hell not going to take it from some punk biped on the other end of a keyboard! One big problem I had learning to ride and not get overridden by my mounts was that I was reared to be always "nice" and "kind" to animals, to look on any physical correction of horses as inherently abusive, and it took a lot of bad shocks, mild physical injury, and the realization that horses thought shoving each other into fences was lighthearted fun (hence "horseplay") to snap me out of this and help me realize that I was not only not doing myself no favors, I was doing my mounts no favors by letting them yank the bit, shove other riders on the trail, go left when asked for right and right when asked for left, and all the other jolly tricks that equestrians well know, because I was too "nice" to snap a fleabite of twig or leather against their shoulders or rumps - we were a menace to everyone, and I had the com.
I had, at that realization, to make the decision whether or not I could ethically and personally manage to reconcile my ingrained attitudes with my desire to be a halfway-decent horsewoman, and to admit that if I didn't have both the ability to overcome my squeamishness and sense of not-nicety, and to do so with dispassion and not just because I was angry/scared by a big animal, that I had no business wearing the boots. Because I was rewarding bad, and even dangerous, behavior every time I climbed in the saddle.
--I was never great, but I got to be okay, and the odd thing was that most of the horses ended up liking me anyway, because I was fair but not a control-freak. (You may know what I mean - the riders who insist on iron control of reins and everything, who swat for every skip, every unordered twitch or toss...I'm a lazy rider too, I just wanted to go places and have a good healthy workout for both of us.) There were a couple who considered any request, by any mere human, and any work in harness, to be a mortal insult, and we never got on. Them's the breaks.
You will often hear that people "just want attention," as a defense of the "just ignore them and they'll go away" stance. This is almost never the case. Most of the time, just as with horses, a good sharp pop on the backside will convince them that a) they don't really want your attention, not that kind of attention, any kind of attention is not enough, and b) the fun of acting out is Just Not Worth It.
Online, this usually translates into the Huffy Flounce Out/GBCW post, best followed by a chorus of "Don't let the door hit you!" from the amused regulars. Concern Trolls are especially prone to this, with dramatic little speeches about how They're Leaving Forever now that their Well-Intentioned Advice has been Mockingly Rejected by this Pack of Ingrates.
But Control Trolls have no sense of...well, anything. They're invariably totally irony-deficient: if I had a dollar for every time I've seen a Control Troll , without any humorous intent, tell everyone else on a com to "get a life" while, himself, posting at hourly rates with timestamps that seemed physically impossible unless the poster was actually HAL, I'd be able to retire today. (Usenet ObRef: Joseph Askew.) So to expect them to have the kind of sense of injured dignity that leads lower-grade Flamers and Concern Trolls to stalk out a la Malvolio is futile. Thus RMM going around insisting everywhere that he doesn't care about feminism, joining com after com to protest over and over again how much he doesn't care and isn't bothered by it. Something's broken up there - this becomes closer to Crazy Stalker Guy than even Crazy Screaming Guy, when you get this level of troll-obsession.
In fact, the behavior of RMM reminds me less of certain deranged patrons I've had to deal with at various places of employment, and more of a couple of seriously psycho animals that I could barely deal with, or not at all: a thoroughly-spoiled Quarter Horse gelding whose mistress thought it was fun and funny to have him be the "brat" who terrorized everyone who came near his stall or pen, and refused to discipline him (and got away with it because she was related to the owner of that particular ranch) and certain neighborhood dogs who behaved the same way w/r/t the whole neighborhood, not just their own yards, and so far have luckily not bitten anyone, but which I fear is only a matter of time.
Nevertheless, even all but the most badly-damaged, completely-unsocialized semi-wild fighting dogs can usually be taught to respect boundaries: but you have to stand strong, start out strong, and stay strong (don't bloody well apologize for bouncing the Screaming Tinfoil Guy!) the more you are dealing with a creature who doesn't at all respect the boundaries of other beings. A sensitive, empathic being can be brought up short and shamefaced with a whistle or a spoken "You! outta the trash!"; you might have to roar "NO! BAD DOG!" and make yourself as tall as possible, brandish a stick even, to get Cujo to leave.
But are you going to stand there and wring your hands while Cujo bites your pets and family and friends, or are you going to pick up a shovel and start shouting yourself - possibly even [gasp! quel horreur!] with intemperate language, instead?
The Control Trolls and the Concern Trolls and the Mad Dog Stalkers - by their fruits shall ye know them, and you don't owe them anything. The people who have flocked to your banner, who give you your Association, your place to stand - that's who you owe something to. And you do owe it, like it or not - you can abdicate responsibility, it being after all the aforesaid free universe; but it goes both ways, fealty does, even if the obligations are nebulous and varying and of no legal status outside the court of Osiris. The having to walk a mile and a half to post, via keychain, earlier this summer, after I got laid off? The posting of piffle despite migraine, despite whatever, just to let everyone know I'm still alive? No big deal. That's what manchi is about, so far as I can manage it. Ye olde noblyesse obligay, as it were--a ramshackle castle with a Lady of Misrule, no less, but we have our tourney of air and shadows, still, and my Taoist job is to keep it standing as long as I can, and keeping giants and bandits from tromping through is just part of it.
But, yanno, not standing over every reader/retainer/guest-in-hall and smacking their wrists and going "Naughty, naughty, naughty, we don't call our neighbors stoopidheads here, do we?" 'Cause that seems like the opposite of both Liberty, and, ultimately, of Order, too - that way lies madness, seems to me.
*The "piñata" model of countertrolling was coined at Electrolite/Making Light way back, the image being that of a troll-shaped piñata getting pounded by the sticks of the regulars, disgorging "candy" in the form of gems of stupidity at every thwack until eventually there is no more to be had, ie the troll has become repetitive and boring - I think regular Xopher coined it, but I don't remember at this date.
** It has occurred to me that a t-shirt bearing only the legend "Proverbs 26:11", in a florid, typically-pietistic script, would be a very wicked chaotically-good and funny thing to wear around.
*** That is ever since I grew up and stopped being a good little conservative tool who accepted the stock movement defenses and praises of censorship as moral responsibility for protection of society from depravity back in the 1970s and '80s, and started wrangling mentally with what if any limits ought to be, and why. --And yes, conservative publications were defending state censorship of the arts back in the 1970s and early '80s, starting with the "protecting the children" argument but not stopping there, when it came to denouncing things for adults like Life of Brian.
~being Yet Another in the siding line of posts begun a while back and delayed due to my accident~
A few weeks ago I brought the banhammer down only for the second time ever (deliberately annoying people until they go away doesn't count) as my stated and default policy is to let people say whatever they want and sort it out with half-bricks and smashed bottles amongst themselves - er, I mean, discuss things in reasonable and mild tones suited to a drawing room, of course... Seriously, I tend to think that even the incorrigibly stupid, or the incorrigibly intellectually-dishonest, like jordan, can provide endless hours of amusement, like catnip mice ahem piñata-like fun for young & old useful opportunities for debaters to hone their skills and gain familiarity with sundry annoying rhetorical devices, or just blow off some steam, without costing me anything, so why should I play Overzealous Soccer Mom/Uppercrust Society Hostess? Life's too short!
Besides, we're all grownups here, so to speak - you're old enough to play tag with the big kids, you're old enough to deal with scraped knees like the rest of us. "Waeeeaaeeeaaah!!! S/he called me a stoopidhead!!!!" isn't something I particularly ever liked dealing with IRL, finding it tedious beyond words, and bored/annoyed P@L is not much fun for anyone, since I can almost always think of even more scathing things to call you, thus explaining my basic laissez-faire comments moderation non-policy, comprised of equal parts Give 'em enough rope commitment to free speech and complete selfish laziness principled tolerance. The only other guy ever banned, we banned - and I say "we" advisedly - after a Betan Vote in which nobody at all spoke up for him, and quite a few people appealed to have him kicked out. So why didn't I wait and give the ubiquitous fandom commenter known as Rational Madman or RMM the opportunity to be sent to Coventry in the same way?
The answer lies in that adjective, 'ubiquitous,' - but I intend to use this as an opportunity to expound my time-seasoned theory of comments management, which I have been able to more fully develop over the last few months, and which may be useful to others in not just dealing with, but conceptualizing their own systems of dealing with, the problem of what I have dubbed "the Control Troll."
I've never been happy with the stock pat advice to just "ignore them and they'll go away," when it comes to trolls - for one thing, it never worked as advice IRL when dealing with sexual harassers, and I haven't seen turning turtle to work online either - and for another thing, it seems to be born out of a combination of equal parts apathy and cowardice, the reinforcement of the Status Quo by those who aren't currently suffering from it. OTOH, I've seen the effort of trying to moderate comments send bloggers nigh round the bend, and part of the stress of it is the problem, imo, of having no coherent ethical paradigm to work from, which creates intellectual and moral strain in trying to feel out an internally-coherent and defensible strategy for coping with online strife. ("Children, Be Nice!" is not an ethical paradigm, sorry!)
I've also never been happy with the simplistic lumping of all kinds of online hostilities into one collective pile marked "Troll," (likewise "Flameage," as I have ranted about all hither and yon for many years) and being blessed and cursed with an analytical mind for as long as I can remember, trying to sort out and band the various strains of Trollery was a natural development. After all, if you're trying to deal with one kind of garden pest, using a remedy intended for another species won't get you very far, necessarily. (My interest in this goes back to the days of Usenet, when a kind of primitive spamblocking setup called a "killfile" was the way most people dealt with flamewars and annoying posters who wouldn't give up, a system which wasn't terribly efficient and which resulted in lots of false positives as well as efforts to get around the banned terms, but was the best that most coms could do in those Wild West days of the internet.)
The evolution of the term "Concern Troll" in the political blogosphere a couple years ago was a great step forward in understanding the dynamics of combat rhetoric (not limited to online dialectic either) and while watching the antics of RMM in fandom and a number of other similar operators infesting feminist blogs elsewhere (they do seem to be overrepresented among Male Chauvinist Pigs, although not all of them are XY) I came up with the term "Control Troll" to distinguish a somewhat different phenomenon.
Now, mind you, no categories are absolute - there is going to be overlap, often considerable, as these are equally tactics, and personality types. But understanding and identifying if one is dealing with a Control Troll - IRL as well as online - can forestall lots of exhausting, self-defeating, and crazy-making efforts at reasonableness with the willfully irrational aka intellectually dishonest, just as being able to spot a Concern Troll at fifty paces will allow you to aim precisely at his spurious empathy and discredit him before the eyes of the multitude.
It's important also to make the distinction between "Trollery" and "People Being Annoying To Me" - one is (more or less) objective, the other completely subjective - just as there is a difference between "Flaming" and "People Being Mean To Me", so right off I am going to limit the definition of "Troll" to someone who is not arguing in good faith. This is not the "classic" definition of Troll, but you know what? There really aren't very many "classic" Usenet trolls out there, the sort of Beavis-Butthead-Parker-Stone-hipster who doesn't care about anything and is just madly tossing golden apples around to start fights for the fun of watching people get mad and argue passionately online. And I never saw many of them, in action, either.
What I did, and do, see a lot of are people who may be annoying as hell, and masters of BS, and wasting of everyone's time, but they're that way because they're True Believers in their Cause, and they just can't shut up and go away, even for a moment. Thus the endless G*N threads on the rec.arts groups, thus the posters who get troll-rated even by people who agree with them on Daily Kos, for endlessly spamming diaries with links to their particular grinding-axes - and the problem is not a lack of seriousness (nor the converse, too much seriousness) but a lack of good-faith engagement. It's someone trying to scream so loud - like a two-year-old on a shrieking binge - that nobody else can be heard over the din, and thus the phrase "Control Troll" was born in my mind.
Concern Trolls are more subtle, and more apparently reasonable - at least at first. The true dividing line between Concern Troll and Control Troll is the respective PPH, or posts per hour frequency, and it doesn't take much at all for your standard Concern Troll to slip right over it. This is where my other, crueller term in the title comes from, the Proverbs 26** Troll, which itself is an arch jab at the inevitably-abridged Rule for Good Women which gets shorthanded in Evangelical Christian circles as "The Proverbs 31 Woman" or often, "more precious than rubies" - a little unfair to our canine companions, as those of us with cats to our dismay can attest, but a vivid image nonetheless.
Since the Control Troll isn't there to engage in dialogue, but to drown out conversation and make dialogue impossible so as to "win" the debate as per his definition of "winning," which means making everyone else shut up and go away out of exhaustion, and then claiming to have proven his point (which is nuts, but there you have it) and is thereby pretty much indefatigable (ie if they give up and go away, they weren't really Control Trolls) the whole question of allowing him to shriek unabated becomes itself a moral issue, and that's where things get sticky for proponents of freedom of speech.
Now, all along*** my ethical model for questions of censorship has been based on J.S. Mill's discussion of speech as a deed involving responsibility - and context! - so that, going beyond the simplistic "shouting fire in crowded theatre" parallel, you get into nuanced questions of the exact same words not having the exact same meaning, depending on who and where and when and in what context they are said (the specific example, paraphrased from memory, being the difference between someone grumpily saying something like "Fucking stockbrokers should all be shot," in a bar, not meaning it seriously, and someone standing in front of a stockbroker's house working up a pitchfork-and-torchbearing mob to go in and string up the stockbroker right then and there) and this making a difference, but the presumption being that overall the PTB should always err on the side of greater liberty, as conducive to working-out of truth, than on the side of Order, heavy-handed.
But then you get the Control Trolls, and how do you reconcile the principles of Liberty and Order?
Every case is different, of course, but I don't think it's that difficult, and I'm going to set out to provide a clear and relatively simple paradigm for bloggers and community moderators to use, when making these calls.
--First, of course, I'm going to provide a bad example of how to do it.
I. "It's my party, I can ban if I want to" - the Flaky Householder Model
This is what you usually hear from people trying to articulate a defense of comment moderation or banning - the claim that a blog is like a private home, and the owner of said home has the right to set whatever house rules she or he feels like, totally arbitrarily, and no body has the right to question them - an Englishman's Home Is His Castle And All That.
Now, technically, that is true (at least functionally, within limits, given that most people don't own but rather rent their servers) - the same way that it's true that you can believe that the lunar landing was faked on a soundstage, or stuff beans up your nose, or insist on talking only in pig-latin, and nobody can stop you. It's a free universe, after all, at least until you start running up against the laws of physics.
It doesn't mean it's a good idea, or a sound defense, or that you don't come out of making it failing to look like a nitwit.
I mean, you can - IRL - insist on your visitors removing their shoes and assume that they will intuit this responsibility by virtue of some osmotic process begun by walking in the door and shout at them when they don't (I am speaking of a typical Northeast American house with linoleum and carpet, btw, not a Japanese home with tatami floors), then yell at them for sitting on the sofas which are too special and fancy for ordinary mortal buttocks to press under ordinary circumstances, but not marked with any sort of device indicating that they are Off Limits, tell them that they can help themselves to anything they want in the fridge and then jump all over them for taking things they were not supposed to take or for using servingware that was likewise Too Special To Use, but not set aside anyhow, and then get all hot and bothered that they don't seem comfortable and at ease and that they keep making noises about how they have to leave soon, and how they never come to visit anyway, they should sit down and stay a while. (I wish I was making any of these incidents up, but I'm not. People don't always outgrow this "you have to play just the games I want to play because you're staying at MY house" mentality just because they've passed puberty and legal adulthood, unfortunately.)
You have every right to do this, as a householder.
What you don't have, is every right to do this, and then be pissed off when nobody wants to visit you. What you don't have is the right to do this, and to expect that everyone else will understand and sympathize with your idiosyncratic, autocratic behaviors. Or that they won't walk out the door and go "What a jerk! I can't STAND her! Magna Mater, could there be a worse inversion of the model of hospitality on the face of the earth?"
Coz you're being a complete and utter prat, and the fact that you have the earthly right to doesn't change that one bit.
And that's what you're claiming for your role, when you say "It's my blog, I make the rules, I don't have to explain them or be consistent or ANYFING cos its MINEMINEMINE!!!1! NYEAH!!!1!" I mean, if that's the self you want to present to the world, be my guest - but don't expect any respect for it, sorry.
II. "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service" - the Responsible Proprietor Model
The really odd thing about claiming "private home" status for a blog is that, well, you know, most homes don't open onto the street so that total strangers can walk in and sit down and have dinner with you, or watch your TV in your living room. In fact, even if you're broiling spareribs in your backyard, with a cooler full of drinks and help yourself, strangers still don't get to walk in and help themselves and join in the conversation uninvited - it's called "crashing," aka "trespassing," and gatecrashers who get caught don't usually get told to pull up a chair and join the family. There's a name for places like that, where total strangers can walk into an establishment and sit down and stay a while without being personally known to the owners, and it's pub, short for "public house."
Now, just because a place is open to the public, doesn't mean that "Anything Goes" - au contraire. The ancient and honorable institution of the Bouncer is there to make sure that it doesn't, in fact.
Even in the tamer sphere of the restaurant, where intangible social pressure is principally relied on to keep the peace, there are rules that must be followed, and penalties that must be paid, if they are broken.
And they are there for good reason, even if some of them are arbitrary and localized, per the owners or per regional custom, because the success of the establishment depends on an overall good experience being had by a majority, and this means that the proverbial arm-swinging must stop before nose-encountering, even if this does curtail the pleasure of those who just want to swing their arms randomly. This can mean that dogs aren't allowed inside, or that people are required to meet certain minimum clothing standards, or that guns are not allowed (this is the case in bars in Dallas, iirc) or that certain forms of conduct must be maintained, and others eschewed, to retain the privilege of being a paying customer.
This is not arbitrary discrimination, even though for example, in another country dogs might be allowed in pubs, or shoes unimportant at a beachside eatery, or table-dancing encouraged at a particularly vivacious venue. Yes, there is a certain conformist pressure, but it is inevitably a very mild one, because if it were too onerous people would not go there (see our Flaky Householder above) - unless, to be sure, the establishment is striving for an atmosphere of Exclusivity and is actively trying to drive away custom to this end, which is hardly the usual condition!
Let us take, for instance, the hypothetical Neighborhood Watering Hole which happens to unfortunately have for a neighbor a Crazy Screaming Guy. Maybe you have one in your area, maybe you're lucky. At any rate, Crazy Screaming Guy will, if allowed, wander into the place and start screaming about Fluoride and Aliens and the Second Coming and Satanic Barcodes and he won't stop. You can't shut him up by buying him a drink. You can't do anything with Crazy Screaming Guy, except put your fingers in your ears - or kick him out.
So do you, as the proprietor, allow Crazy Screaming Guy to go from table to table, interrupting your customers' lunches with his rants about Purity of Essence and demands for free tinfoil?
Or are you under an ethical obligation, having encouraged them to come within your walls as a refuge from the world, to protect them from Crazy Screaming Guy's harassment? Even if you think Crazy Screaming Guy's the funniest thing in the world, or even if you think he's right - or if he's your brother and you don't want to get your mom angry at you for not letting him come in and drive away your patrons with his unwashed shrieking? (By which last I refer to the alas-too-common phenomenon of moderators who let their BFFs get away with all kinds of shit, while riding micromanaging-kindergarten-teacher herd on everyone else. You know the type, if only from fourth grade...)
I would argue that, as the proprietor of a virtual establishment - and that is what the host of a blog-with-comments is, only an flocked blog would count as a private home - one in fact has a duty to not let the Crazy Screaming Guys run amok in your chophouse. Even though most of us run fairly loose joints, with BYOB policies and open mike nite every day of the week, we still are the ones with the bouncers' stool, in the end, and the phone by the tap to call the cops.
And I'd seen, in the previous month or so, more than enough evidence to tell me that RMM was a Crazy Screaming Guy and make that call, within one day, without putting it to a Betan Vote. I'd never once seen him engage in anything like an honest, good-faith attempt at debate, and I'd seen ample evidence of him being an insanely-obsessive, utterly-dishonest little creep (and I'm being nice, mind you) all over the fannish blogosphere, monomaniacal on the subject of feminism, a living embodiment of "anxious masculinity", and I had another factor to consider beyond the whole boring/funny troll question, and the annoyance-to-regulars, and that was the animal behavior problem.
Longtimers know that a lot of my attitudes towards dealing with fellow humans have been shaped by my firsthand experiences as well as reading of others' experiences with dogs and horses - big social animals capable of doing not insignificant amounts of damage to each other and bystanders and themselves, with highly-developed emotional awareness and sensitivity, and powerfully ambitious for social advancement in-group. To put it another way, If I wouldn't take this from a thousand-pound animal with four-inch teeth, I'm sure as hell not going to take it from some punk biped on the other end of a keyboard! One big problem I had learning to ride and not get overridden by my mounts was that I was reared to be always "nice" and "kind" to animals, to look on any physical correction of horses as inherently abusive, and it took a lot of bad shocks, mild physical injury, and the realization that horses thought shoving each other into fences was lighthearted fun (hence "horseplay") to snap me out of this and help me realize that I was not only not doing myself no favors, I was doing my mounts no favors by letting them yank the bit, shove other riders on the trail, go left when asked for right and right when asked for left, and all the other jolly tricks that equestrians well know, because I was too "nice" to snap a fleabite of twig or leather against their shoulders or rumps - we were a menace to everyone, and I had the com.
I had, at that realization, to make the decision whether or not I could ethically and personally manage to reconcile my ingrained attitudes with my desire to be a halfway-decent horsewoman, and to admit that if I didn't have both the ability to overcome my squeamishness and sense of not-nicety, and to do so with dispassion and not just because I was angry/scared by a big animal, that I had no business wearing the boots. Because I was rewarding bad, and even dangerous, behavior every time I climbed in the saddle.
--I was never great, but I got to be okay, and the odd thing was that most of the horses ended up liking me anyway, because I was fair but not a control-freak. (You may know what I mean - the riders who insist on iron control of reins and everything, who swat for every skip, every unordered twitch or toss...I'm a lazy rider too, I just wanted to go places and have a good healthy workout for both of us.) There were a couple who considered any request, by any mere human, and any work in harness, to be a mortal insult, and we never got on. Them's the breaks.
You will often hear that people "just want attention," as a defense of the "just ignore them and they'll go away" stance. This is almost never the case. Most of the time, just as with horses, a good sharp pop on the backside will convince them that a) they don't really want your attention, not that kind of attention, any kind of attention is not enough, and b) the fun of acting out is Just Not Worth It.
Online, this usually translates into the Huffy Flounce Out/GBCW post, best followed by a chorus of "Don't let the door hit you!" from the amused regulars. Concern Trolls are especially prone to this, with dramatic little speeches about how They're Leaving Forever now that their Well-Intentioned Advice has been Mockingly Rejected by this Pack of Ingrates.
But Control Trolls have no sense of...well, anything. They're invariably totally irony-deficient: if I had a dollar for every time I've seen a Control Troll , without any humorous intent, tell everyone else on a com to "get a life" while, himself, posting at hourly rates with timestamps that seemed physically impossible unless the poster was actually HAL, I'd be able to retire today. (Usenet ObRef: Joseph Askew.) So to expect them to have the kind of sense of injured dignity that leads lower-grade Flamers and Concern Trolls to stalk out a la Malvolio is futile. Thus RMM going around insisting everywhere that he doesn't care about feminism, joining com after com to protest over and over again how much he doesn't care and isn't bothered by it. Something's broken up there - this becomes closer to Crazy Stalker Guy than even Crazy Screaming Guy, when you get this level of troll-obsession.
In fact, the behavior of RMM reminds me less of certain deranged patrons I've had to deal with at various places of employment, and more of a couple of seriously psycho animals that I could barely deal with, or not at all: a thoroughly-spoiled Quarter Horse gelding whose mistress thought it was fun and funny to have him be the "brat" who terrorized everyone who came near his stall or pen, and refused to discipline him (and got away with it because she was related to the owner of that particular ranch) and certain neighborhood dogs who behaved the same way w/r/t the whole neighborhood, not just their own yards, and so far have luckily not bitten anyone, but which I fear is only a matter of time.
Nevertheless, even all but the most badly-damaged, completely-unsocialized semi-wild fighting dogs can usually be taught to respect boundaries: but you have to stand strong, start out strong, and stay strong (don't bloody well apologize for bouncing the Screaming Tinfoil Guy!) the more you are dealing with a creature who doesn't at all respect the boundaries of other beings. A sensitive, empathic being can be brought up short and shamefaced with a whistle or a spoken "You! outta the trash!"; you might have to roar "NO! BAD DOG!" and make yourself as tall as possible, brandish a stick even, to get Cujo to leave.
But are you going to stand there and wring your hands while Cujo bites your pets and family and friends, or are you going to pick up a shovel and start shouting yourself - possibly even [gasp! quel horreur!] with intemperate language, instead?
The Control Trolls and the Concern Trolls and the Mad Dog Stalkers - by their fruits shall ye know them, and you don't owe them anything. The people who have flocked to your banner, who give you your Association, your place to stand - that's who you owe something to. And you do owe it, like it or not - you can abdicate responsibility, it being after all the aforesaid free universe; but it goes both ways, fealty does, even if the obligations are nebulous and varying and of no legal status outside the court of Osiris. The having to walk a mile and a half to post, via keychain, earlier this summer, after I got laid off? The posting of piffle despite migraine, despite whatever, just to let everyone know I'm still alive? No big deal. That's what manchi is about, so far as I can manage it. Ye olde noblyesse obligay, as it were--a ramshackle castle with a Lady of Misrule, no less, but we have our tourney of air and shadows, still, and my Taoist job is to keep it standing as long as I can, and keeping giants and bandits from tromping through is just part of it.
But, yanno, not standing over every reader/retainer/guest-in-hall and smacking their wrists and going "Naughty, naughty, naughty, we don't call our neighbors stoopidheads here, do we?" 'Cause that seems like the opposite of both Liberty, and, ultimately, of Order, too - that way lies madness, seems to me.
*The "piñata" model of countertrolling was coined at Electrolite/Making Light way back, the image being that of a troll-shaped piñata getting pounded by the sticks of the regulars, disgorging "candy" in the form of gems of stupidity at every thwack until eventually there is no more to be had, ie the troll has become repetitive and boring - I think regular Xopher coined it, but I don't remember at this date.
** It has occurred to me that a t-shirt bearing only the legend "Proverbs 26:11", in a florid, typically-pietistic script, would be a very wicked chaotically-good and funny thing to wear around.
*** That is ever since I grew up and stopped being a good little conservative tool who accepted the stock movement defenses and praises of censorship as moral responsibility for protection of society from depravity back in the 1970s and '80s, and started wrangling mentally with what if any limits ought to be, and why. --And yes, conservative publications were defending state censorship of the arts back in the 1970s and early '80s, starting with the "protecting the children" argument but not stopping there, when it came to denouncing things for adults like Life of Brian.