“A disproportionate number of people I’ve recruited in the past, that worked out really well, were already looking to make a big change in their lives.

“I get tons of lovely fan mail.. the memories of these valentines fades quickly. Not so the ill-considered, pseudonymous rant.. Many’s the time I’ve found myself neglecting a warm bed, a hot meal, or a chance to go out for a cup of coffee with a friend in order to answer some mean-spirited note..

Don’t let assholes rent space in your head.

“Many community conveners are not technically capable of writing their own message-board tools, but socially qualified to wield them. For example, Teresa Nielsen Hayden is a troll-whisperer. For some reason, she can spot irredeemable trolls and separate them from the merely unsocialized. She can keep discussions calm and moving forward. She knows when deleting a troll’s message will discourage him, and when it will only spark a game of whack-a-mole. Teresa calls it “having an ear for text” and she is full of maddeningly unquantifiable tips for spotting the right rod to twiddle to keep the reactor firing happily without sparking a meltdown.

If you want to fight trolling, don’t make up a bunch of a priori assumptions about what will or won’t discourage trolls. Instead, seek out the troll whisperer and study their techniques.

“Slashdot uses an elaborate scheme of blind moderation in which users are randomly assigned the ability to rank each others’ messages so that other users can filter what they read, excluding low-ranked posts. These strategies are effective for weeding out the pathetic attention-seekers, but they don’t have a great track record for creating rollicking discussion. Instead the tone of the discussions, even read at the highest level of moderation, is an angry, macho one-upmanship. The top posts are often scathing rebuttals of someone else’s ill-considered remarks.

“Stupid code banter is a fundamental human need.. it’s more fun to review code before the flaws are petrified in a subversion trunk.

“No one will ever invest in your idea. Make it both of yours.

“Typing what you want to find is still a far cry from typing what you want to do.

“Synchronous and asynchronous communication solve different problems.

“It was nice to see India celebrate so much after beating us.

“Using vi/vim properly, you don’t use it modally. You are always in normal mode, and only enter insert mode for short bursts of typing text, after which you press Esc to go to normal mode.