I’ve been called a troll there for agreeing with the author, but just not agreeing heartily enough.

Sites like that are the rule, not the exception.

There is a different between opinionated and obnoxious and trolls, flamers and spammers. Engaging with a troll or flamer to deliver “brutal and public moderation” is never going to achieve a positive outcome.

If a community is only seen to consist of reasonable people, most folks will be reasonable. If they trolls and flamers realize no one is paying attention, they’ll either change their behavior, leave or continue to be ignored.

As for the Slashdot method, you have to have your threshold set to zero in order to be a moderator. So, there is no way to moderate only the “good posters”, you have to moderate everyone and then other “meta-moderators” get to judge you on your moderations. Complicated, but it works.

As for inhumane? Hardly. Waterboarding is inhumane. This is akin to sitting a misbehaving child in a timeout corner for 5 minutes until they apologize for whatever they did.

i gotta agree with the other dis-agreers here. some people have no desire to be constructive members of a community. i’m assuming that the guy in the first blog post is projecting his own perspective of being an actual “decent human” onto others who’s motivations and incentive structures differ fundamentally from those that one would expect of “decent humans”.

it does suck to censor people, but at times, depending on your priorities, you simply have no choice. if our bodies were truly libertarian, we’d all have died of cancer before we ever got out of whatever mysterious womb that magically managed to survive long enough to attempt to gestate us. biology made its compromises to promote survival. perhaps, social systems must sometimes make their own as well.

And, of course, those obnoxious commenters who aren’t intentionally obnoxious will stop bothering anyone with their accidental obnoxiousness.

What I find interesting is what happens when there’s a larger community that learns about this feature. How much angst will there be about having been ghetto’d? How many irritating calls to be reassured that they’re not will there be?

Unfortunately this leaves you powerless when the people either don’t like your site and want it to die (e.g. the political/religious fanatics) or actually seek out and enjoy the negative reactions. Ignoring them is a good start; what we need is something like the distributed spam lists where like-minded sites can share the information about the names & IPs which they’re blocking. Getting rid of anonymous comments is also starting to appear almost mandatory.

While I don’t think it would solve (or even affect) the problem of trolling in general, it sounds like a not-so-bad solution for a single site.