That's the big question. How do you balance free speech and open expression with a stable, positive community? What do you do with the inevitable trolls who get their kicks out of disrupting communities and exploiting loopholes? The more users come here from reddit, digg or other social media sites the more of an issue this is going to become. However you decide to deal with it, you should at least be aware that it's coming.
Agreed, it's an important subject and believe me I don't think it's being ignored or down played.
It's funny you should bring up digg, because that is the perfect example of a team of admins that did everything wrong. They saw a problem with their system that sadly couldn't handle being gamed, as well as no active solution on how to absorb the effects of the problem. So instead of tweaking the system, and working towards allowing the community to mitigate the issue they completely overhauled it, gave themselves all the power and cut out the community all together. This ended really badly for them.
So, I think the goal here is to approach it from an angle that empowers the community by building the foundation and creating the tools that are capable in off-setting the negative effects of the negative/abusive minority.
That's the big question. How do you balance free speech and open expression with a stable, positive community? What do you do with the inevitable trolls who get their kicks out of disrupting communities and exploiting loopholes? The more users come here from reddit, digg or other social media sites the more of an issue this is going to become. However you decide to deal with it, you should at least be aware that it's coming.
Agreed, it's an important subject and believe me I don't think it's being ignored or down played.
It's funny you should bring up digg, because that is the perfect example of a team of admins that did everything wrong. They saw a problem with their system that sadly couldn't handle being gamed, as well as no active solution on how to absorb the effects of the problem. So instead of tweaking the system, and working towards allowing the community to mitigate the issue they completely overhauled it, gave themselves all the power and cut out the community all together. This ended really badly for them.
So, I think the goal here is to approach it from an angle that empowers the community by building the foundation and creating the tools that are capable in off-setting the negative effects of the negative/abusive minority.