Since yesterday’s post, I’ve been deluged with trolls who want to post comments about their views of sexual harassment. I’ve been deleting them as they come in, and that has, in turn, led to lots of complaints about how horrible unfair and mean I am.<\/p>\n
I’ve been doing this blogging thing for a long time, and I’ve watched as a number of sites that I used to really enjoy have wound up becoming worthless, due to comment trolls. There are tons of trolls out there, and they’re more than happy to devote a lot of time and energy to trolling and derailing. When I started my blog, I had a very open commenting policy: I rarely if ever deleted comments, and only did so when they were explicitly abusive towards other commenters. Since then, I’ve learned that in the current internet culture, that doesn’t work. The only way to maintain a halfway decent comment forum is to moderate aggressively. So I’ve become much more aggressive about removing the stuff that I believe to be trolling.\n<\/p>\n
Here’s the problem: Trolls aren’t interested in real discussions. They’re interested in derailing discussions that they don’t like. I’m not interested in hosting flame wars, misogynistic rants, or other forms of trolling. In case you haven’t noticed, this is my blog. I’ll do what I feel is appropriate to maintain a non-abusive, non-troll-infested comment section. I am under no obligation to post your rants, and I am under no obligation to provide you with a list of bullet points of what my exact standards are. If I judge a comment to be inappropriate, I’ll delete it. If don’t like that, you’re welcome to find another forum, or create your own. It’s a big internet out there: there’s bound to be a place where your arguments are welcome. But that’s not this<\/em> place. If I’m over-aggressive in my moderation, the only one who’ll be hurt by that will be me, because I will have wrecked the comment forum on my blog. That’s a risk I’m prepared to take.<\/p>\n Let me add one additional comment about the particular trolls who’ve been coming to visit lately: I’ve learned, over time, a thing or two about the demographics of the people who visit this blog. As much as I’d prefer it to be otherwise, the frequent commenters on this blog are overwhelmingly male – over the history of the blog, of commenters where gender can be identified, the comments are over 90% male. Similarly, in my career as an engineer, the population of my coworkers has been very, very skewed: the engineering population at my workplaces has varied, but I’ve never worked anywhere where the population of engineers and engineering managers was less than 80% male.<\/p>\n But according to my recent trollish commenters, I’m supposed to believe that suddenly that population has changed, dramatically. Suddenly, every single comment<\/em> is being posted by a woman who has never seen any male-on-female sexual harassment, but who was a personal witness of multiple female engineering managers who sexually harassed their male employees without any repercussions. It’s particularly amusing, because those rants about the evil sexually-harassing female managers are frequently followed by rants about how the problem is the difference in sexual drive between men and women. Funny how women just aren’t as sexually motivated as man, and that’s the cause of the problem, but there are all of these evil female managers sexually harassing their employees despite their inferior female sexual drive, isn’t it?<\/p>\n Um, guys?! You’re not fooling me. You’re not fooling anyone. I’m not obligated to provide you with a forum for your lies. So go away, find someplace else. Or feel free to keep submitting your comments, but know that they’re going to wind up in the bit-bucket.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since yesterday’s post, I’ve been deluged with trolls who want to post comments about their views of sexual harassment. I’ve been deleting them as they come in, and that has, in turn, led to lots of complaints about how horrible unfair and mean I am. 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