Jay's Other Stuff

drst:

jsmooth995:

Why “don’t feed the trolls” isn’t always useful advice, and maybe sometimes you should feed the “trolls” if you damn well need to.

“Gay for a Day” came out of a trolling incident.

We had a troll on the Bronze back in the day, who couched his extensive homophobia in what seemed like reasonable language. Because he wasn’t screaming profanities, we tried to argue with him, but it didn’t make a dent. One of our lurkers, who when motivated had an immensely powerful rhetorical ability, showed up and decimated this guy, and it didn’t phase him at all.

And so we tried to ignore him, until one of the LGBTQ members of the community confided in someone that the silence felt a lot like agreement.

So one of the women finally posted to this guy, “Well, I’m gay, and I disagree with you.”

Then I posted the same thing. Then dozens of other people did. Soon we had a whole board flooded with people acting in solidarity. There were a lot of Spartacus jokes too, because, well, we were Buffy fans. Meta movie references were kind of our thing.

Hardly a major civil rights moment, obviously, but the troll left, and those of us who did it sent a signal to our friends that we wouldn’t leave them standing alone against people like that.

Really appreciating all the stories people are sharing.