On trolling

I have been following one person on Nostr that has been experiencing problem with racist posts and attacks. The person references the situation often in posts and replies to the attacks.

I feel for the person and understand the pain, but on open networks, like Nostr, I have to question the approach.

If there are attention seeking assholes on Nostr, I don't think trying to discourage them by giving them more attention will work. How could it? Think through what happens next...

I have been through many darknet/clearnet communities over the years and the one thing thing I learnt is there are only 2 working mitigation strategies against trolls:

- Completely ignore/block and move on

- Clearly and unemotionally explain how and why their specific trolling works to other "readers", but not talking to the troll directly.

Any other step will invite more trolling exponentially (people defending, people trolling the defenders, defenders attacking the trolls, trolls attacking the "meta" people, etc).

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Discussion

Great advice.

Paid relays. Works wonders

It sort of does, but it has limits.

If some troll really wants to go at it, then 5000 sats is a low bar.

+1! Giving attention to attention seeking assholes doesn't sound like a good mitigation strategy to me...

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