When You Believe You've Encountered A Troll At DU...

[Jamastiene]

35. Other...

Believe it or not, I very rarely, if ever, alert anything on DU3, even if it is something nasty and is directed directly at me.

Since DU3, I have seen homophobic, sexist, transphobic, anti-Semitic, and racist posts go unhidden far too often to test my luck. What I mean by that is that I think at any minute, admins of this site could decide to punish people who alert and the alerted post is not hidden.

After all, the number 7 got one of my friends tombstoned on DU2. I know how the wind blows with Skinner when it comes to minorities. You just about have to stage a years-long protest to get him to talk about it. Even then, he left *some* mods who hated most of the rest of us in the GLBT community in charge of our forum over on DU2. That fucking sucked. He tried, but it didn't really work out. They allowed some horrible things to be said to us and deleted our replies to the people saying those things. It was a nightmare and utter failure.

We have much better control now in the LGBT Group here on DU3. So, in a very big way, that much Skinner did right and I am glad he did. Inside the group, we can do something about it now when people are being horrible to us, but only in the group. We cannot do anything about it outside the group.

Even in the group, I try to just read and watch out for assholes who drop by to remind us they are assholes. The beautiful thing is I have since learned not to use ignore until we decide to block someone from the group. THEN I can ignore them. I just decided to do it that way because manually re-ignoring all of the people I had ignored on DU2 would have taken ages and I could not have watched out for their appearance to taunt us on DU3 too. This way, I can watch and see how people behave and then once they are blocked, I don't have to see their hateful crap any more.

A lot of crap is allowed to stay on DU3. And because homophobic, transphobic, sexist, racist, and anti-Semitic posts go unhidden on the rest of DU3, I consider myself a sort of outsider when I am outside of the LGBT Group on DU3. I know I am in hostile territory and expect horrible crap to be said in just about every thread.

I still don't trust my chances enough to alert someone I suspect is a troll. Between me and someone I suspect as a troll, it is a tossup which one of us might get PPRed by admins. I honestly don't know that I would be the one to not get PPRed instead of the person I suspected was a troll.

imo, there are lots of racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and anti-Semitic (usually if they are one of those things, they are pretty much all of them, if you pay attention) trolls on DU3, but we do have more leeway to go ahead and just respond to them and "takes" our chances. It has its good and bad points, doing it that way, but I just don't trust my luck enough to alert very often. The few times I did alert at the beginning of DU3, I got an immediate email back saying it had been decided already and the post stayed. So, I just usually respond, tell them I think their views are atrocious and that I think they are full of shit, then move on.

There's no love on DU. It's all hate. It was never exactly Kumbaya all the time before, but there used to be some people on DU who actually gave a crap about each other. That's gone now. It is like the cast of a major show you watched for years slowly swapped each character with their opposites through the years until you hardly recognize anyone any more. If you see someone from the old days, it thrills you because you haven't seen them post in so long.

But as far as alerts on DU go, I very rarely do it nowadays. I know to expect hate to stand on DU now. In every thread about rape, there will be people saying the woman deserved it or claim she is lying (there is a LOT of that). In every thread about anti-gay hate crimes, there will be several jerks who will find a way to blame it on the gay person. In threads about racism, there will be the same posters who ALWAYS show up in those threads to tell people of color on DU what racism is and is not. In threads about sexism, there will always be the MRA types in there to talk about how good women have it compared to the most brutal places where women aren't even allowed to drive. Yeah, like we should be thankful they "let" us drive here in America. Bunch of bullshit is what they push in those threads. I won't even set foot in IP because I don't want to see the anti-Semitic shit that passes any more than I have to.

Forget having a conversation about transphobia on DU. Some of the same public restroom paranoids show up in every one of those threads even to this day on DU to talk about how horrible transgender people are and how they think transgender people are just in there to look at their obnoxious asses, as if. I have never seen anyone expect such privacy in public restrooms until some of the people on DU who hate transgender people started showing up to make bullshit comments and argue for hours about how their privacy is violated. Then there were the oodles of shower comments on DU during the DADT debates that never got deleted. We were told to STFU for years on DU when it came to GLBT issues, but I see we were right to NOT STFU like so many on DU wanted us to. It's the only way we were able to get any rights.

So, all in all. I have to answer other. I just don't alert any more on DU. It's a waste of time, really. Unless you can send word about a newb troll to MIRT, forget bothering to alert. Now, if you can find a way to let MIRT know before they lose the power to do anything about it (before the troll gets their foot in the door and gets too many posts and is untouchable), I have to say, MIRT will do what they can to stem the tide of assholes who try to troll DU.