Alpha Mail: Gamma and the banned trolls

Since a few people apparently don't understand why it is necessary to limit the access of problem commenters from time to time, I figured it would be a good idea to directly address the critics:

I think the more important question is why Vox Day is such a cunt that he feels the need to block people.

The reason it is necessary to block certain troublemakers is because failing to block those people would entirely destroy the comment system. It has nothing to do with my character, my opinions, or my preferences. The purpose of a troll is to disrupt the discourse, and their tactics range from artfully attempting to provoke reactions from the blogger and the commenters in order to change the topic to spamming the comments with tens of thousands of comments. There are others, usually politically motivated, who make a round of blogs posting the exact same comment at each of them. Most readers are unaware of how persistent these attempts at disruption are, or how destructive they would be if left unchecked.

For example, in one case, the troll commented 12,000 times in a single hour, posting messages that were so bizarre and disturbing that when I contacted the police in his hometown and sent them a copy of a few hundred of them, they sent an officer out to his house immediately. It turned out that it was a guy off his medication who might well have been a risk to himself or others.

Do you seriously think any site could possibly survive that level of disruption by mentally unstable individuals intact? Because it does happen and that is what you're going to get if you permit unrestricted comments on a sufficiently popular site.

I've been blogging for 15 years. I have learned how to quickly identify those commenters whose objective is to a) disrupt the discourse and cause problems, b) sell something, or c) work out their psychological issues in public. Since none of those objectives are even remotely in harmony with my own, I will quickly ban and spam any commenter who falls into one of those three categories.

I started a blog to be an extension of my presence on some forums. I got banned by two of them, and since I had no platform to argue my case from, I used my blog to examine what happened and the nature of the moderators. Afterwards, I would continue to examine moderator issues on my blog, gaining some readership--not to mention moderator criticism--in my posts.

My model for this: Vox Day's reaction to the SFWA. I was trying to emulate what he had done.

After I started to realize the moderators would not respond to me, and that most forum members simply didn't care that I was gone, I figured my reaction was ineffective from the beginning. Though, to her credit, there was at least one forum member who seemed to change her ways after some blog-to-forum dialogue.

In any event, after being ostracized and not really having any kind of a regular contact with my old online associates, I feel like it's all just wind and fury signifying nothing. I've been shutting down the blog in spite of growing traffic numbers. The whole thing just seems to be an exercise in gaining "atta boys," which doesn't interest me.

But this post and one on Vox Popoli does cause me to ask a question: Why isn't Vox's reaction to the SFWA considered a gamma response?

The most basic reason is that I'm not a gamma. The second reason is that the larger part of my "reaction to the SFWA" was demanded by the SFWA. They published a very long report and required me to respond to it, which I did in detail. The only thing I did that was unusual was do it all in public rather than behind closed doors as they preferred. They actually filed a DMCA takedown notice because they were so desperate to hide their embarrassingly absurd report. The third reason is that I can't simply accept my being "expelled" from SFWA for the obvious reason that I wasn't. It never happened.

The rules for expulsion that were applicable at the time are very clear. First the SFWA Board had to vote. Then the entire membership had to vote. No vote of the entire membership ever took place, nor has SFWA ever declared that I was expelled from the organization. All SFWA has ever declared is that the Board voted to expel an unnamed individual. And that's true. It did. But that's as far as the process ever went.

I'm not a Gamma who is upset at being rejected from a group, I am a Sigma who is exposing a complete charade that was perpetrated on the science fiction community by a very small number of people abusing their positions. Moreover, the conflict has been very good for me and for the publishing house for which I work, so I have no reason to ever let it end.

Vox, you usually post some good articles, but lately you've been dropping the ball. First off, if you are banned from a website/forum, you aren't able to comment, AT ALL. If the user is able to comment then he isn't banned. Second, a person who bans someone for having their views challenged is the definition of a coward since he fears confrontation and his views might not be as strong as he believes, this is basically SJW in a nutshell, SJWs love to block, shame and use guilt tactics to shut other peoples arguments.

First, that's very naive. For example, one troll at VP was known to use 31 different pseudonyms. There are at least two others who have utilized more than that; there are currently 39 different trolls in the autovanish list. Trolls also make use of different IP addresses to avoid IP blocks. Second, I don't ban people for challenging my views, as should be readily apparent by looking at almost any comment thread on either blog.

Trolls who are banned for their bad behavior often complain that they are being banned for challenging the site owner's views, but since so many others are not banned for doing so, that's obviously a false claim. What they are being banned for is their unacceptable, disruptive, and often intentionally destructive behavior, and that's the only reason.

Free speech cannot survive one person shouting everyone else down or constantly redirecting the subject to what they prefer to discuss. Free speech is an ideal, not an absolute or a practical policy. Maximal free speech is achieved by applying the minimum amount of moderation required to permit everyone their chance to speak. It is not achieved by allowing everyone to shriek as loudly as they can as often as they want.

As I already mentioned, I've been doing this for a long time, and never more successfully than now. So, there is absolutely no reason to change what is quite clearly working, and I am not going to change it. Either abide by the guidelines I have established and pay heed to any warnings you are given or you will not be commenting here. It is as simple as that.

It's a big Internet. No one is forcing you to be here.