Which shows you right there how naïve some libertarians can be. The real-world effect of this is that kids who make dumb kid mistakes are now being sent to private prisons due to the judges having back-door deals with (or sometimes an outright financial stake in) the prisons in question.

Before you "not all" me, think about simple economics here. Any time you introduce the profit motive into something that should be run entirely for the public good, you automatically create crap like this. Its inevitable.

First off, no I won't pay directly for any web content. Nor will the general public at large (unless perhaps involves pron). You can remove that idea from your head right now. it won't work, because nobody will show up.

Secondly, you can't just magically fix trolling with a dumb barrier of some kind. It really takes a human to spot the difference between someone putting forth an honest opinion, and somebody trying to create chaos. Not only that, but trolls are inventive and creative, and can swamp even a seemingly large moderation team with damage to fix. So you need a surprisingly large team monitoring every nook and cranny of your website 24/7. There's just no way to do that, short of enlisting your users.

So the previous sentence is the key here: You have to enlist your users to keep your site usable. They generally want that, but they certainly aren't going to be inclined to provide a lot of help if they think they are already paying somebody else to do that job.

Right now the only decent known cure for Trolls is reputation-based postings and user moderation. Putting a paywall up front will drastically lower your moderator pool, which will just help trolls.

Nope. Troll in question I believe hailed from Colorado, IIRC. He did it because the guy he wanted to bully wasn't female, or any ethnic or religious minority, so attacking "Canadians" was the best he could come up with.

He was a really nasty piece of work. He'd pick out victims, find out who they worked for, and call their employer and try to get them fired. If their employer did any work for the government, he'd call the government accounting office on them too. Posted full details of home addresses and any "dirt" he could dig up publicly online. You have just no idea how scary and upsetting this is until it happens to you. Its not something that can (or should be) "laughed off" or ignored.

Real trolls are serious business.

No. There is a fundamental difference.

Trolls are not trying to express their opinion, they are trying to create discord and distress. Anything they say is just a means to that end. They don't care about what they say, and will happily change their "opinion" if they see another that will cause even more distress.

I once saw a troll make a racist statement about Canadians. Yup, I wouldn't have thought it possible either, but troll managed it.

Trolls don't have opinions, they have strategies.

Ah. Never been under direct private attack on Slashdot before, so I wasn't aware they hadn't extended the system to personal messages. That's a shame. Still, its effectiveness on the public commenting system shows the concept's value.

Wish this had been modded up. In addition to the above, BlockTogether also automatically shares block-lists (so if anyone of your "friends" using the app blocks someone, everyone else using it will also block them). The daily-N-word victim I was talking about was raving about it the other day. Now only the first person Mr. Racist trolls with his fresh account ever has to see his crap.

Its kind of a neat idea to implement a reputation-based user moderation system entirely from outside Twitter (since Twitter hasn't been doing the job).

Trolls don't have opinions, they have strategies.

This bit right here tells me the author doesn't know much about Twitter. Twitter has an almost identical problem. One person I follow (who happens to at least front as an African-American female), has a dedicated Twitter stalker who makes new accounts every day just so he can make sure she gets to greet each new day with a tweet calling her the N-word. Rape threats are endemic there for identified females too. A "searchable body of work" is only a concern for those of us who care about our reputation. Trolls don't care in the slightest.

The only even partial cure I know of for crap like this is reputation-based user moderation, like you find in sites like Slashdot or Stackexchange. This at least allows the manifold eyes of your readers to do some of their own policing, and provides for much more prompt cleanup. A dedicated troll can create a hopeless amount of soul-killing destruction for one or two poor beleaguered individuals. But against a community of hundreds (or more) moderators, the amortized work is manageable. More importantly, the troll isn't going to get much satisfaction, as almost nobody sees their handiwork before someone mods it away.

If you have an online commenting system, you really need a user moderation system to back it up. I'd suggest Discourse, but there are probably other drop-in solutions available.

Perhaps you should share your qualms with the good folks over at the Free Software Foundation, since they insist on them as well.

Not in those two cities there aren't. And even if every engineer happily picked up stakes and left their homes for new jobs in other states, what does that do to the rest of the community that suddenly loses all those high paying jobs? Housing prices drop, the local service industry takes a hit (possibly causing more job losses). In general less money is flowing around the district, hurting the local economy, which hurts everyone. Losing lots of high-paying jobs in a community is a BFD. Ask anyone from Detroit, if you don't believe me.

The congressmen in question are Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.).

SpaceX is "competing" (or rather beating the pants off of) a Lockheed Martin / Boeing joint operation called United Launch Alliance (ULA). From their webpage:

This is essentially congressmen performing constituent services for their district, albeit in the most cynical way possible.

I know he's made it onto the Slashdot front page without having accomplished anything much more in his life than I or half a dozen other folks of my generation can boast. My grades were similar to his, I also had a really high IQ on some bogus test when I was a kid. I don't remember exactly how my ACM programming teams did, but 90 of 250 sounds roughly in the right ballpark. I've done NASA work, and know at least one way to "hack" some of their systems. Yet, I seriously doubt you'll ever see an article about me up on the Slashdot front page (and if you do, most likely it means I screwed something up epicly).

So clearly he's at the least a genius at self-promotion.