User blog comment:Edwin Shade/How To Deal With Trolls/@comment-32213734-20171215214408

According to some psychological experiments, it seems that humans, unlike others apes, have a natural tendecy for equality. For example, last year I read in internet about a psychological experiment: a group of humans grows rich faster, when they are not aware how much money others member of the group   have. So, in the beginning all they are poor. If they know how much money have each other, the result: a few very rich and many poor. If they don't know, the result: many rich and some poor. When I read this, I thought: "Is not it the same on the internet? But instead of money number of posts, friends, subscribers, bages, registration date, ranks, titles, other regalia... Maybe a site will grow faster, if a user not aware of all this for other users?" (Apparently, if a system creates inequality, people tend to subconsciously boycott such a system).

On this site users can know registration date, contribution, rank of other users, but only on user's page. All this remain unknown for a user unless this user check other user's page. Furthermore, all this is assigned automatically and completely clear why. So, perhaps, we should not rank users, especially by hand, when it is difficult to avoid subjectivity. Since users are as are.

I think, we need to fight trolls with extreme caution, since sometimes fighting trolls can make more harm than trolling itself. An analogy from medicine: disfunction of immune system may cause autoimmunity and allergy, and heavy antibiotic misuse may cause severe side effects and accelerate the evolution of pathogens.