Since bigotry lately means "anything the person that call the other bigot don't likes" it is still quite broad.

A direct insult is easier to enforce.

The reason trolling succeeds is that it is extremely easy to induce powerful cognitive dissonance into people with strongly held unprovable beliefs. (Human life has value, god exist, humans are equal and the likes) And the only answer is aggression. The right are as easy pray as the left - mostly because there are large logical holes in any ideology.

That is because we use some axioms when we build our social order - but any attack on the axioms leave us unsecure and that the virtual tribe is under attack.

The more a person has allowed himself to degrade to a single identity - the powerful the potential blow is.

Probably one of the best (unintentional) trolls I have done is reducing old communist to tears by stating the rumors that Che was betrayed by Fidel with Raul as the organizer of said betrayal.

It's also sad to see how people on either side of the debate on basically any issue what so ever are becoming more and more intrenched in their ideologies. It used to be that people were right wing or left wing. Now you have ideologies about everything, a cell phone you use, a car you drive, the type of food you eat or don't eat.

With grater availability of free expression that can reach many people, the arguments that used to be civil and intelligent quickly devolve nowadays into shouting matches, where the messages shouted are the most extreme, and often the most idiotic, version of any given side's message.

It's true on any board nowadays, even something like HN. It's very sad to see well meaning and intelligent people devolve to this, especially considering how ineffectual the actual messages people are shouting are.

I generally try to form my own opinion about things. Which basically means that my views are generally hated by both sides in this increasingly polarized society. To the left I am a bigot and to the right I am a morally deprived tree hugging liberal.

Not sure if comments are to blame exclusively though. Perhaps another lesson to take out if it would be the quote from one of the cinematic masterpiece of this century, Harold and Kumar: "There is no reason to get riled up every time a bunch of idiots give you a hard time. In the end the universe tends to unfold as it should."

I go by the 'hate' metric. The more someone is motivated by hate, the less I tend to agree with them.

I'm sure someone might say, "what if I really hate Nazis?" in reply to that, but then I'd have to point out that the Nazis hated others to the point of mass-murder, which is a lot more than they're hated and say that I balance things out that way.

In other words, some hate is just blowback and how willing you are to harm others for disagreeing with you is something to take into account when figuring out what people to socialize with.

Well if someone says that he really hates Nazis and is younger than 60 years, he is probably not the sharpest knife in the drawer... which is a huge red flag. Same with loving them - both require some form of temporal closeness.

Edit: Hating or Loving the Nazi ideology is another beer - ideas are immortal.

I have a friend who admitted to me he'd made up a right-wing persona to troll people on the Guardian comment section.

He found it funny how irate people would become with his extreme views.

I convinced him to knock it on the head when I found out he was posting from work, and warned him his work will be recording that it was him, but it's a good example of how pointless anonymous comments can be.

So would you have a problem with the exact same comments he was leaving, being left by someone who genuinely held those views? He's essentially just playing devil's advocate which can play an important role in discussion. The number of people with enough time on their hands to adopt a fake persona will be trivially small compared to those who are treating the service 'seriously' or those who are abusing it using far easier methods.

Boredom is a very powerful thing. If someone has time on their hands they can wreak a lot of misery through anonymous comments.

> I think it's better to moderate only incivility, bigotry and the like, as bans on "trolling" appear to have morphed into bans on dissent at some point

This is a built-in problem (the built-in problem?) with censorship. There can not be community oversight of the censor's work because the censor's work is to hide things from the community. The result is that the censor is free to extend its power at will.

Which is why I like HNs approach, showdead - off by default

Concern trolls are civil and can do very great harm to a community.

Any community that cannot survive being questioned is automatically suspect to me. I have trouble understanding why responding to questions with censorship could ever be appropriate.

If you're weary of answering the same questions over and over, you can make a FAQ. I've made plenty of those myself. But if your community has questions that have to remain unasked that you're hiding from, I have to believe that's a problem with your group, not with the questioner.

So I have to disagree: I would prefer to be up front and answer questions, rather than hide from them by banning people.

I agree - so many people have the following reaction to being asked questions: either clam up, or insult you and call you a name for "not getting" the point they are making. It's always suspect to me when someone cares enough about something to comment or post about it, but then doesn't want to answer questions about it.

That's not what concern trolling is.

I am having a hard time reconciling that with your comment downthread about banning people and the samples one might find - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Concern_troll

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the term "concern troll" focuses not on what the person is actually saying, but on some alleged agenda. Thus, if misused, it is the perfect refuge for someone who has no counter to the actual argument: simply ignore the points made, allege some other position, and then accuse the other person of lying if they deny that that is what they're really saying. It's a combination of straw man and argumentum ad hominem: make up something to attack, and ignore their actual points on the basis that since the points were made by someone acting in bad faith, they need not be addressed.

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So no, I wouldn't ban them. I might disagree with some burdensome "reform" on the basis of it being burdensome or of questionable value, but I would not hesitate to answer those concerns with argument rather than by questioning the motives of anyone who might question me.

If the question comes up too often, it's a good candidate for a FAQ, not a ban.

What is concern trolling exactly? Trying to change a community more to your liking because you dislike its rules and want your rules to reign supreme, by expressing concern about the ways of the community.

Concern trolling uses gentle methods to create havoc and discord.

Those methods usually involve "asking questions" about meta stuff. Some forums exist in uneasy balance between a group who'd ban a lot more people and another group who'd ban many fewer people. A skilful concern troll destroys that balance and has those two groups arguing.