Users cannot solve a structural problem. Individuals cannot solve a systemic problem. This is why we need things like public health in the physical world, and why we need platform-level content moderation or other system-wide limits in the virtual world. I’m a fan of long-delay posting, for example: hold every comment for three hours. There’s evidence that this reduces trolling. Why not try it?

For everyone here saying, “Just block. Easy fix!”… it’s important to listen to the people for whom “just block” is not enough.

Blocking by individuals does not scale.

AND WE KNOW THIS.

Sorry to shout, but to suggest after decades of “just block” failing to impact bad online behaviour, when it gets repeated today it sounds a lot like, “I don’t care about people who are more vulnerable than me.”

Either that, or “I don’t care about facts”, because it’s just a fact that “just block” doesn’t work to control the trolls. It never has. There is no reason to believe it ever will.

Without scalable anti-troll measures—which must be implemented at the platform level—trolls will make life online solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short for a lot of people. That’s wrong.