ON A PLATFORM ADVOCATING FREE SPEECH - TROLLING IS LIKE THE FLU BUT CENSORSHIP IS CANCER

I've recently completed a clinical workup on our beloved platform.
In my opinion the prognosis isn't looking good.

Symptoms:

Some people are causing grief, resulting in feelings being hurt.
These bad feelings get reciprocated
This breeds a negative feedback cycle. It makes it "ok" to hurt others.
People feel "threatened" by this and want to encourage additional censorship options, in order to feel "safe".
Others just want to make people feel as bad as they do inside.
Hard feelings are starting to permeate discourse, and the community is egging it on, rather than shutting it down.

Diagnosis:

This is what cancer looks like in a social network.
Some people support those who spew messages of hatred & divisiveness.
Others point at it and say See! We need to censor this!!! I need to censor this! Please censor because it offends me!

Censorship in any form is a cancer to a free society.
Free and rational discourse is the only cure.
But free and rational discourse, require free speech for all.

Root Cause:

We're all using the same words, but we speak different languages.
English isn't a language. It's an amalgamation.
It is vast and diverse, even native speakers have trouble with it.

English is what you get, when every language, humps every other language.

To prove it, I want everyone reading this, to post an image showing either, a boot or a hood. Take your pick of either one and just post a picture of the first thing that comes to mind.

The point being that there is a huge disparity in language use, even in native English speaking countries.
The same word can mean different things or event opposite things, even in the same country.

It gets even worse when you have people from different cultures trying to find common ground using English.
Men and women also have different expectations from communication, so there is also a gender barrier in many cases.

In most cases what you think may be trolling or sociopathic behavior has it's root in communication barriers and only you have the power to tear those barriers down.

Prognosis:

Tit for Tat retaliation is like the flu. But the censorship tools we've created are a type of cancer.
It's virulent, it has metastisized and it will be fatal if we don't take positive action quickly to shut it down.
Fortunately each of us can take positive action and shut it down starting right now.

Prescription:

If you think you have enemies on this platform, think again.

That isn't to say that everyone likes you. But you won't find actual enemies. As in the kind with actual bullets.
People do get angry, they do get jealous and they do vent. Most of the time this begins with a miscommunication.
When they vent it isn't pretty. It exhibits as diarrhea of the mouth and constipation of the brain.

You don't have to feed into it. You don't need to answer a challenge to your honor coming from someone's verbal diarrhea. When you do that, what you're really telling them is that they have power over you.

Think about that a moment...
You are the only person in the world, who gets to control how you feel about anything.

The only power that no one can take away from you,
Is that you get to "choose" how you feel about everything!

Did you really just give your power to someone else?

If your feelings were hurt or you were made angry by something someone said, then yes you gave up your own power.

If people say bad things about you or anyone else, it's enough to just say
"I really thought you were a better person than that. I've decided to unfollow you, now you're on my ignore list."

Notice the absolute lack of any emotion? This is a message that says "I own how I feel and I'm making a choice".
Compare that to any message that contains the words "you made me", "i felt I must", "i had to".

Owning your emotions means you own yourself!

Doing that may trigger them to rant and rave, but unless you care about how they feel, then it shouldn't matter.

If they make threats of violence, then report them to the police.
Once you do this then stand back and let the police do their job.
If the police won't take action, then at least consider the possibility that perhaps they're not really a threat?

I know people want to make this a "safe place" for everyone.
But it already is safe. No one can reach through your monitor and harm you.

It's your feelings that got hurt and that's only because you allowed it. You get to choose, how you get to feel. You can also choose not to feel anything at all. That's your super power!
Don't let anyone take that away from you. Ever!

The scary thing is that...
People can only hurt us, when we care enough about them, that they matter!

This is the internet, not a cocktail club.
If you feel unsafe, it's because you actually do care what that other person thinks.

You have offended someone somehow, they are alien to you, their motives are alien and you don't understand why they feel the need to lash out. This makes you afraid, and when you're afraid you suddenly go from hero to target.

Once we come to that realization, the only thing we can really do is approach the other person and try to find common ground.

Doing that requires us to look through the words on the monitor and try to imagine the person on the other side of the keyboard.

It starts with realizing that somewhere in the world, there is a person on the other side of the keyboard who wants our attention.
They crave it badly enough to seek out that attention, even if it's in the worst possible way.

Nevertheless, there is a person there. We need to see the person, not the words.
Find them and you may find a new friend. Or you may just walk away with a profound understanding of them and a new entry on your muted list. But at least you tried.

If you are not the offended party, or the person doing the offending then the rest of this is for you.

Watching someone vent in public is like watching someone take a dump in public, it isn't pretty but frankly it isn't your business. It's certainly not the world's business, so don't upvote either side of it. Even if you feel like they might be in the right.
You CAN comment, as long as you try to remain neutral. But if you have feelings for one side of the other then perhaps that's not the best idea.

Perhaps the most powerful thing you can do is to just turn and walk away, maybe with a memo that this isn't the place to do that.

Meaning if your friend is on the attack with a case of verbal diarrhea, tell them to chill the fuck out.
If they won't chill out, then I recommend you, unfollow them, mute them, and walk away.

Mute is the most powerful tool we have. My mute list is getting rather long and I still have more high quality content to swim through than I could have ever dreamed.

There are thousands of voices here who are not getting heard and probably never will be. Find some of them and lift them up.

We absolutely do not need to lend our support any message of anger or hatred or retaliation.
Hate breeds hate, violence breeds violence and yes flagging is an act of violence.

Which brings up the final part of this prescription...

Both the rep and the flagging system need to go.
We need to push the developers to fix this right away.
At the moment, flagging only has a cost for the person being flagged.
This makes it the perfect tool to cause grief and distress with.
It's the ultimate tool for passive aggressive violence.

If we're going to keep it.
Make flagging available only to level 55 and above.
Make it be something that requires significant amount of SP to execute.
Flagging should immediately cost the flagger, SP equal to a weeks worth of power down, plus it should deduct a rep point. If they don't have the points and the SP then they shouldn't have the right to flag. They haven't earned it.

That's assuming we keep rep and flagging at all.
To my mind, neither of these have a place in a society that claims to stand for free speech.

If we're going to enforce laws, for example some country's definition of copyright, the law should not be subjective.

It should be an objective function of the witness nodes.
Things like copyright protection can easily be distributed to bots who interop with the witnesses for a small fee.

Our code is our only law.

If we need a change to law, we change the code and vote in witnesses which support the new code.
That's exactly how this system is supposed to work. We don't need police.

At most adding a "downvote" I disagree with you" button, that does nothing but tick a counter.
This is enough to voice dissent.

Rep is worse than useless. It tells you nothing useful about a person. Nor should it.
You should never rely on someone else's judgement of someone else's character.
As @tuck-fheman said,

at best it's a misleading quantification about some content they put out in the past.

Number of followers is something controlled directly by their followers.
As hard as it is to gain new followers now, each one should be cherished.

So if someone you are following is behaving badly, don't sit idly by. Do the right thing and try to stand up and correct them. But if they won't listen, then tell them good bye, unfollow them, mute them and walk away.
Having a mass exodus of followers, should be enough to get anyone to realize they have developed a case of verbal diarrhea.
This is the cure...