So here is the original post again:

I think it would be good to put a definition for what trolling is that the community can agree upon. I also think there are many users who don’t recognize that the behavior they are engaged in is a form of bad faith trolling.

Because they have the agreement of the majority, they make a tacit assumption that they are acting in good faith. I think Bishop 2012, “This is why we can’t have nice things at scale” is a good starting point for understanding how this kind of group think bad behavior emerges.

For example, user is engaged in an almost permanent state of sealioning. Its like, actually a bit amazing how they do it. And I don’t think they are doing so in intentional bad faith (or at least, they don’t think of themselves as engaging in bad faith behavior), in spite of the fact that they are almost perpetually trolling. Its that a cultural norm of abuse and trolling has been established in an effort to diminish specific views people disagree with.

Because of this, I think there is only so far a “trolling” ban can take us, because fundamentally, to not be trolling (or engaged in some other kind of bad faith argument/ behavior), you actually have to engage with the points the other party is making, on their terms. If we want better discussions here, we have oblige a set of cultural norms that make that possible in the first place, the principal of which would be to attack the other persons argument and evidence, not their person. To stop the abusiveness and trolling, we actually have to shift the culture of the community, because right now, the majority of the community is not engaging in good faith, and and they probably don’t know that they aren’t. I think if we could come up with a short list of maybe 8-12 examples of the major fallacies and types of trolling to pin to the side bar, keeping in mind that most users probably aren’t aware they are engaged in them, call people out on them when we see it, and stand up a few points above the rules teaching people “how” to engage in good faith, we can try to reset the cultural norm to actually be make arguments that are grounded in fact and evidence based where possible, and that this would go a long way to increase the overall rate of civility.

At no point did I call them a troll. I said that they were engaged in trolling behavior.

Now when they gave us that nice example, I think at that point calling them a troll is fair game, because they now positively engaged in the behavior that was previously identified as trolling.

And yes, I did call them out as a troll in the second response, because, well, thats what they were doing. In doing so, they made the central thesis of my first point self-evident: They aren’t aware of their own behavior. They went right into their trolling behavior; as such they are a troll. There is nothing wrong with calling something by its name. If we’re going to be more concerned about the manner in-which we call out bad behavior than we are the bad behavior itself, well we’ve lost the thread entirely at that point.