A troll really is about online acts. In person behavior isn’t actually relevant. I would guess that most rolls are perfectly reasonable people in person. (While I do think it is possible to be an accidental troll, by spawning huge acrimonious and pointless threads without intending, but the disruption is still as much of a problem when it happens.)
“Troll” implies malign motives. Someone can be a massive dick with complete sincerity.
But we don’t actually care about motivation, we care about stupidity.
Personally I suspect leaving the comments of the poster in question visible, buried in a slag heap at −12, is just fine. You have to want to look, and examples of blithering stupidity are often useful as teachable examples.
Actually, I think it would work if the tag that indicates number of replies to a downvoted-to-oblivion post also had the average karma for the thread. This would give a fast way to judge whether the thread would be worth reading.
A troll really is about online acts. In person behavior isn’t actually relevant. I would guess that most rolls are perfectly reasonable people in person. (While I do think it is possible to be an accidental troll, by spawning huge acrimonious and pointless threads without intending, but the disruption is still as much of a problem when it happens.)
“Troll” implies malign motives. Someone can be a massive dick with complete sincerity.
But we don’t actually care about motivation, we care about stupidity.
Personally I suspect leaving the comments of the poster in question visible, buried in a slag heap at −12, is just fine. You have to want to look, and examples of blithering stupidity are often useful as teachable examples.
Actually, I think it would work if the tag that indicates number of replies to a downvoted-to-oblivion post also had the average karma for the thread. This would give a fast way to judge whether the thread would be worth reading.