Don't feed the trolls

@stubbornella

DON’T FEED THE TROLLS!
Thursday, May 31, 12

when I worked at yahoo there was a mailing list called devel-frontend. It should have been a great place to share
information across teams, but it was so nasty no one would dare to ask any questions. They were afraid. So everyone
sat in their corner, not sharing, and not learning as much as they could have. Sad!

I’ve included my twitter user name “stubbornella” above because there is a test I’m going to show you that I think
you’ll want to try later. I’ll tweet out a link to it after the talk.

I’m a consultant. I mainly spend time going in to big companies and helping them sort out their giant CSS ﬁles, my
job inherently rubs people the wrong way. I’ve worked hard to learn not to take that personally and I want to share a
bit of it with you today.

DEF. TROLL - PEOPLE WHO SEEK
CONFLICT


At a yoga and mediation retreat in California, I spoke to an Italian researcher about the difficulty she was having with
the other academics she worked with as part of the EU in Brussels. She said that the senior person in her domain was
aggressive and forceful. She felt she had to match his vitriol in order to keep from being run over. At the point I met
her it had been going on for six years. She was exhausted.

SOME PEOPLE ARE ENERGIZED BY
CONFLICT.
If you aren’t, you will always lose,
if you play the game by their rules.


What I noticed from the italian researcher’s description was that this guy pretty clearly thrived on conﬂict. The more
she fought back, the more energized he became. The inverse was true for her. She thrived on collaboration and
connectedness. The more they fought, the more drained and depleted she became.

WHO ARE YOU?


Do you prefer a collaborative or combative environment? Figure out what kind of person you are, and you’ll know a
lot about how you want to interact with the world. (though, even if you are collaborative, sometimes you will still
choose to deplete energy when conﬂict is required). Decide what tone you want to have, and carry it through to your
interactions.

TROLLS FEED ON ATTENTION
You get more of whatever you give your attention to.


IF YOU ONLY RESPOND TO ASS-HATS
Your life will soon be full of ass-hats


intentionally redirect your attention

SOFTER, GENTLER, MORE
CONSIDERED OPINIONS
tend to get lost in the fray.


We need to intentionally turn toward them, give them the recognition they deserve. The best ideas are not always the
loudest.

SOMETIMES A TROLL IS NOT 100%
TROLLISH


RESPOND TO THE HUMAN
Human
13%

Troll
87%

Troll Human

Even within a single person we need to turn our attention to their human bits rather than their trolly bits.

“This is stupid. You have no idea what you are talking
about.

The padding in the ﬁrst exampel should be a margin to
avoid an IE7 bug.”


Potential responses
#1:
“This is stupid. You have no you. Who are you calling stupid? You
F*&% idea what you are talking
about. can’t even spell.

The padding in the first exampel should be a margin to
#2:
avoid an IE7 bug.” You don’t have to be rude. I’ll fix the IE7
bug in the next patch.

#3:
Thanks for the bug report, I’ll fix the IE7
bug in the next patch.


BLOG: DON’T PUBLISH EVERY
COMMENT
You are responsible for your readers and the tone of the discussion in your space.


I felt obligated to let anyone speak in my blog comments until ﬁnally I realized, this is my house -- if people can’t be
civil, they aren’t invited. I am responsible for keeping that community collaborative for my readers.

TO TWEET OR NOT TO TWEET?
When you reply to someone who is being a troll, you give them more attention. You are
also responsible for your followers.


Maybe the best thing for a troll is to be ignored!

MAILING LISTS
If a mailing list goes off the rails, release something cool. Distract, distract, distract.


I’m pretty impressed by the OOCSS google group. We have managed to have almost entirely collaborative interactions
over the last several years. When things have seemed less productive, I do not reply to that mail, instead, I release
something cool, or ask an open ended question (that is ideally more interesting that the trolly-thread).

HACKER NEWS
These people don’t care about your project, they are purely there for trolling.


WHY DO DIFFERENT COMMUNITIES
HAVE MORE OR LESS TROLLING?


RECOGNIZING TROLLS
There are several different types. Once you recognize them, they become part of a
pattern. Not as upsetting!


JEALOUS TROLL
“I did everything you did, only ﬁve years ago and better.”

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/34585748@N00/321902708/sizes/z/in/photostream/

THE GRAMMAR NAZI
“Go back to school and learn to spell, then maybe someone will take your ideas
seriously.”

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/cali4beach/6039415545/


BIASED TROLL
Humans are subtly biased - pattern matching machines. We
expect others who do what we do to be like us.


Sexist, racist, etc. This kind of troll has a big blind spot. Usually, they can’t see that they aren’t treating people fairly,
or are failing to be compassionate about someone else’s experience.

SCARY TROLL
“How long are you going to lead the web astray
before you just disappear?”

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/56380734@N05/6937763971/sizes/l/in/photostream/

GET SUPPORT
ideally, without feeding the trolls


Get to know others in the community, talk to them privately, let them know you are being trolled or bullied, ﬁnd ways
to isolate or exclude the troll if ignoring or confronting his/her behavior doesn’t work.

TAXONOMY OF TROLLS
http://tantek.pbworks.com/w/page/19403022/TrollTaxonomy


AND, INTERNAL TROLLS
Harder to identify, because most of us have a
vested interest in believing we’re not ass-hats

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/shareski/3786803863/sizes/l/in/photostream/

WE’RE ALL TROLLS SOMETIMES


INTERNAL TROLLS FEED ON
INATTENTION
To avoid feeding your inner troll, you must *notice* it.


WOMAN IN TECH


A few years ago, I wrote an article about my experiences as a woman in tech. Talk about a way to bring out the trolls!
It was also amazing because I met so many female developers I never would have otherwise known. Anyway, it
generated so many comments on my blog that moderating them became a full time job for 3-4 days.

Someone had linked in the comments to Project Implicit, a research project out of harvard, and since I’m also a data
geek, I wanted to see what I could learn about the state of my brain.

PROJECT IMPLICIT
Uncovers bias.

http://goo.gl/2601D


Project Implicit has a very creative way of teasing out biases, and if you are open enough to seeing yourself clearly it
can provide you with a very interesting view of yourself.

It is a little game in which you sort words & pictures into different bins.


The ﬁrst test I did was to see if I was racially biased. First, I sorted white people and black people into different bins.

Agony,
Joy, Terrible,
Love, Peace, Horrible,
Wonderful, Nasty,
Pleasure, Happy Evil,
Glorious, Awful,
Laughter Failure,
Hurt


Then I sorted positive words and negative words into bins.

NEXT, THEY COMBINE BINS


So, you might sort positive words and white people to the left, and negative words and black people to the right.
Then they ﬂip it. All the while, they’ve been measuring exactly how long it took for you to do the sort. A kind of
psychological timing attack.

If it takes you longer to do the sort with a particular combination than it does with the other, it implies that that sort
caused cognitive dissonance, therefore bias has been uncovered.

I AM NOT RACIST


BUT, I AM SEXIST


I did the test and found it easier & faster to sort women and home-related words and men and work related words.
At ﬁrst I thought “no way!” But thinking about these issues had changed me. I began to notice that I spent less time
replying to email from women, I subtly expected them to be less technical, less interesting, and therefore less worthy
of my limited free time. That is awful to admit, but it is the truth. I was sexist.

-- the test results ﬁt with what I saw in my own behavior, but was very hard to hear.

CHANGE IS MADE BY SIMPLY NON-
JUDGMENTALLY NOTICING THAT
THINGS AREN’T RIGHT


I started noticing all the ways that I was subtly biased against women in tech, and, in doing so moved back to the
center. I didn’t try to overcorrect (which would be awkward), I just noticed and tried to be forgiving with myself
because sometimes, part of being human is to be a troll. We all have trolly bits.

GROUP IQ

If you ﬁnd yourself having both troll inclinations and human inclinations, you might want to consider group IQ when
you decide how to behave. A study was done to test the IQ of teams relative to the IQ of individual members.

Certain teams performed above the level indicated by their individual IQs and others underperform markedly. The
difference researchers found in the groups was their level of collaboration & diversity (in particular the number of
women in a group is highly correlated to positive group IQ outcomes). I work to quell my inner troll and uncover my
biases so that I can collaborate more effectively.

@stubbornella

WE CAN MAKE OUR COMMUNITY
STRONGER
if we learn not to feed the trolls


Don't feed the trolls

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