Any community that completely shuts down due to a handful of trolls was a rotten community to begin with.
I beg to differ. You can really have one or two people changing the environment without 'breaking' rules and still be trolls. As a staff you don't want to jump too soon, but delaying can be costly it doesn't mean the community had bad staff or lack of staff or whinny members.
There is no reason to take trolling as anything more than harmless fun. It's irritating at it's worst and anyone who reacts negatively to trolling is simply overreacting in my opinion. Never mind completely leaving a site.
I think you are limiting yourself to the 'trolls' you deal with in Youtube that are indeed just poisoning text to stir up a fight. If you think you rather those type of trolls over spamming be my guest, as I stated in a past post, we might have a different image of troll.
The truth of the matter is when trolling happens over the internet both parties, despite how angry or malicious their words may appear, are sat at their computer screens completely indifferent to what is actually happened (I believe there's actually a rage comic demonstrating this).
Once again, that is not 'the truth of the matter' it is simply your opinon because, once again, you are limiting yourself to the mild troll that can be ignored. Also a rage-comic is a laughable place to say something can be demonstrated (still welcome to share with me for the giggles, was it
this one?
). But do not generalize that is as far as they can become. It is certainly not harmless fun for some victims and it is not just because they are wusses that can't cope with a bit of 'drama' or constant disagreeing. When I think of trolls I think on the ones that work similar to anonymous but in a smaller scale, still can get a phone number and call you day and night, still can affect your life and even to the point of leaving school, city, etc those ones that can bully a person to suicide and are not limited to public forums or youtube. So please, do not generalize that harmless fun is as far as they can become. It is certainly not harmless fun for some victims and it is not just because they are wusses that can't cope with a bit of 'drama' or constant disagreeing.
Spamming on the other hand can be used much more maliciously than people are letting on. Entire websites have to be shut down at times due to server load caused by spam. That's real damage. Not people ragequitting a forum due to a few trolls. If trolling were even half as damaging as people are letting on in some of these posts, you would see a "Report Troll" button rather than "Report spam" on youtube comments pages.
To get a website shut-down for server load you need to have people coordinated to post or visit. If that place gets shut down often, people
will end up rage-quitting the forum o feel unenasy to post. Spamming in that sense is just a technique but it is still a troll behind it maliciously trying to destroy the community.
In the end, I think it is just we have a different opinion of trolls, perhaps it is a generation thing and now troll has been diluted to simply post something radical and opposite to stir movement wherever in the net. So I don't think we can really do much but agree to disagree in this matter. By stating why I think trolling is worse I am no way saying spamming it is not in itself a huge annoyance.
ADDED :
This link may help better to have some sort of common ground.
I am think more in online high-end harassment used by malicious and/or destructive type of tolls mentioned in this article.
