As I believe Jesus said, "The trolls will always be with us."
Or maybe it was poverty? But that can't be right because we're doing a fairly good job eliminating poverty by dint of a combination of global trade, democracy, and technology as well as a number of increasingly well-studied, data-backed interventions.
Reductionism works as well with social policy as anything else, and by focusing on one concrete, specific, problem at a time--girl's education, say--instead of poorly defined abstract conditions like "social justice", it turns out to be possible to make actual progress against something that traditionalists claim must be an inescapable scourge of humanity.
So what about the trolls, those unpleasant denizens of social media, lurking under metaphorical bridges, dangling bait in front of innocent newbs, disrupting online communities and making life miserable?
Trolling can take many forms, from posting things that are deliberately hurtful to disingenuous messages intended to mislead or confuse. The purpose of trolling is always the same: to disrupt sincere communication between genuinely interested people.
The motives for trolling are probably as various as the people who do it, but at a guess trolls are mostly interested in some combination of attention-seeking and power-seeking, which amount to the same thing.
Trolling destroyed the primordial global social media platform: USENet, which ran successfully from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, until the Endless September in 1993 created a slow erosion driven by a combination of a failure to scale and increased trolling, which two problems may or may not have something to do with each other.
Unitary human communities have the same upper size limit: Dunbar's Number, which is about 150 people. At other scales human communities don't simply fade off at the edges, but have boundaries, within each of which there is a higher degree of trust. One boundary may be around fifty people--the extended family scale--another around 150--the village scale--and a third in the low thousands--the clan, deme, or county scale. Getting humans to work together in larger groups than this requires extreme organizational innovation, either in the form of religious cults, or amoral hierarchical organizations, as found in the modern corporation, the New Model Army, and the bureaucracies of socialist states (the primary reason the "contradictions of capitalism" so rapidly reappear in socialist revolutionary societies is that they use the same organizational innovation to operate at scale, and the problems we see with "capitalism" are in fact problems with amoral hierarchical organizations.)
Modern social media--Twitter, Facebook, and so on--have the same problem with trolls that USENet did. They've just weaponized it.
Trolling is now a feature, or a resource. It drives "engagement", which is to say, it keeps people irritated and arguing, which drives clicks and eyeballs, which is what social media companies need because they are nothing but giant, not every effective, targeted advertising platforms: a random number generator would do a better job at feeding me ads on Facebook, where I routinely see ads for dating sites, overpriced "tactical" outdoor gear, services that will have a Bible delivered to your door complete with an eager pilgrim ready to "explain" it, and--lately--plus-sized lady's lingerie, although sadly, no flour-sack bikinis
But does it have to be this way? Humanity lived for hundreds of thousands of years in bands that bifurcated as they approached Dunbar's Number, and then we invented religion, and nations, and amoral hierarchies, and human rights (which primarily exist to act as a check on amoral hierarchies), and now we have organizations that span billions.
Is there a technology that could operate at scale, allow the online human connection we all apparently crave, but avoid trolls without the heavy burden of manual moderation?
Very likely. We just haven't (quite) invented it... yet.
But we do have data suggesting what parts of it might look like.
Kind Words was developed as a game on the Steam platform with the intent of exploring a kind of "furthest south" of online interaction: players can only post relatively short messages, which are public, and people who respond to them can only respond one time to each message. Everyone is anonymous, which is sometimes cited as being an enabler of bad behaviour online, but y'know what? It isn't.
The reviews are overwhelmingly positive (you can download the game here) and thus far has proven to be troll-proof.
There is a law of economics that says, "If something has happened, it is possible." Kind Words has connected a large number of people--far more than Dunbar's Number--in overwhelmingly positive interactions. Those interactions have existed within tight limits, but the obvious question is: how far can they be relaxed or replaced with other, less stringent, limits, and still deliver the benefits of online connection without the trolls?
We know from the tech discussion site slashdot that user ranking systems ("karma"), user-based moderation, and meta-moderation (in which randomly selected high-karma users moderate moderations) can dramatically reduce the influence of trolls.
We know from wikipedia and stackoverflow--both sites filled with user-generated content--that community moderation can work in non-discussion forums.
We know that slowing down the flow of discussion, limiting the number of replies, and similar structural mechanics of the kind used by Kind Words can also have a positive, anti-troll, pro-social, effect.
And we know that social media designed along these lines will look almost nothing like today's online ecosystem of perpetual anger and angst and envy.
We know how to enable users to create their own communities via Discord, but no one has yet built a Discord-like service that incorporates by default all the things we know decrease trolling.
Games like Kind Words are showing us what is possible, and telling us that not only won't the trolls always be with us, they might not always be trolls, because once trolling is no longer easy or effective, trolls have no choice but to disengage--unlikely given our nature as social primates--or to engage with kindness and sincerity, which have an enormous capacity to heal.
Positive and hopeful. 🙂