Seems he cant even open his mouth without you lefty liberals finding fault with what he says. And then trying to muzzle his supporters when they speak up. IT WONT WORK!! WE KNOW OUR RIGHTS!!!

NOT for ALL ETERNITY, and for the benefit of the INVENTOR, not patent trolls.

All this to-and-fro about how to force the ideal comment system into existence – so sad. It seems to me that many don’t realize having to put up with trolls, idiots, sockpuppets and all the rest is the intrinsic reverse of the medal that has freedom of speech on its other side. Not that any private entity hosting a forum is obliged to observe that, obviously – but with that concept having been deemed worthy of being declared a human right a bunch of times and all that, one would think we all would want see it upheld (and even enforced) a lot more than we actually seem to.

The thing is, regardless of what means one conceives of to discard some part of a discussion, all one will get is a discourse tuned to the specific likes and dislikes of the specific person, system or algorithm employed – paying with lost opportunity to have an idea challenged, in a potentially relevant manner regardless of the tone the challenge is delivered in*, for the convenience of not having to hear what one would prefer not to. It’s paring speech down to the specific likes and dislikes of the one gate-keeping entity, human or automated, and as such it’s a failure by design, with no exceptions, because a single entity’s criteria for what is positive and what is negative could never – and absolutely should never – be substituted for the individual judgement of each participant. Not even the “hive mind” is a suitable entity for such a task, unless one’s ambitions in life amount to, putting it bluntly, being a sheep.

To be perfectly clear: yes, that means having to trawl through the arbitrary (but generally large) percentage of lesser discourse not really worth reading and all the requisite unsavory bits yourself – the whole point is that only you are qualified to decide which part is that.

Except of course what most of us would really prefer are echo chambers full of yes-men considering they make you feel good about yourself, do not require the non-negligible effort of constructing a valid argument – or potentially changing one’s own views which is something basically nobody ever is willing to do – and they definitely save you the almost certain frustration of being verbally abused to hell and back. Then again, we do live in a delusional world these days where we think we can magically have all the good bits of most everything without having to put up with any of the unpleasant ones. From the entitled commoner so sure that anything bad happening to them must be _someone’s_ fault who needs to be promptly sued, all the way up to our benevolent masters apparently so sure that encryption can be both secure and backdoored – this seems to be happening on every level. So I suppose “yay for our benign censors who will deliver us from anybody we don’t like” it has to be – and like it or not, even the system described above is nothing but one further step in that direction…

*No, I’m no fan of verbal abuse. But there’s a time for calling an idiot by its name, and I will absolutely not accept that manner detracts from the validity of the argument put forward, assuming it had any in the first place. Admittedly it’s a somewhat contrived parallel, but I do think a certain mr. Torvalds seems to agree at least to some extent.

Yeah… that’ll work! Glyn, people who are determined to “correct” or slag Mike and the crew off will fill in the form, then whinge about it in the comments. It might also chill commenting by making people answer the damn questions every time they want to make a point. There’s the option to sign in to avoid answering the questions, but that will limit commenting to determined trolls and signed in users. Will that really elevate discourse on TD? I think that what we have works well enough.

I love you, I do. With all sincerity. Signed: Both of the Crazed Hamiltonian AND the Lone Ranger.

Best to not piss off Remo and Chuin.

I remember the times when the worst trolls we had to see were Tara Carreon, darryl and Jacques Nazaire.

Now with Shiva Ayyadurai thrown into the mix it’s like the above three trolls had a massive orgy, gave birth to triplets, and now the triplets are having an orgy in the articles. It’s a train wreck.

I need this for people who respond to my emails. It gets tiresome getting replies from people who obviously didn’t even read what I sent them.