driven off by trolls

To be driven off by trolls is to leave a troll-friendly wiki, internet forum, newsgroup, electronic mailing list or other interactive internet forum due to conflicts between users that one or more party considers intolerable... those who depart have been "driven off" and those who remain are "trolls". This is considered an insult by those who leave, and a compliment by those who stay, and so is acceptable to anyone who admits that the conflict was the real reason they departed.

In any large public wiki relying solely or even mostly on soft security, there will be departures and general losses of interest due to various reasons, of which conflicts between users is only one. Thus it is not always right to say that someone who leaves after a conflict is really "driven off". This phrase should be used only when "it's you or me" type reasoning is employed, or, when the clash of values is so severe and recommends such contradictory hard policy (e.g. use of mediawiki features like block IP or delete that ordinary users can't fix) that no faction or due process system can overcome it. For instance, status of a GodKing as the sole arbiter of disputes, reliance on technological escalation to resolve conflicts as a general strategy (which some believe leads directly to wars), and other things that are, in general, signals of serious political dispute.

In real life, politicians or potential politicians are sometimes driven off by trolls, forced to resign by criticism of their ethics or habits or personal motivations or prior behavior or secrets or even just lying about something or changing their mind so much no one can trust them. This is just a part of the ordinary politics as usual which applies whenever due process and some fixed power structure just can't resolve an issue, or shouldn't try to...

Many politicians explain when they quit politics that they "can't take the heat" or "didn't want to expose my family to that" meaning troll activities. The trolls of course take this as a sign of success. The most notable troll of this kind is Larry Flynt who offered a million US dollars to anyone who could tell a sexual misbehavior story about a Republican Senator or Congressman during the Clinton sex scandal. This offer produced many stories and actually forced the incoming Speaker of the House, Ron Livingston, to resign. So trolls in the real world do most certainly affect politics and drive off hypocrites!

This seems to be a good thing to some, while others, calling it "government by Larry Flynt", objected to one person having such power over political choices. But in fact, he achieved his objective by purely legal and social means and with no libel or use of any special power, other than money, which of course many supporters of Republicans also had. So he did not use any power allocated to him by any leader or technology, but by the economy itself, which may or may not be a technology. If it's a technology, then Larry's a sysop, if not, he's a troll.

References

Adapted from the Consumerium article, "Driven off by trolls" http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/index.php/Driven_off_by_trolls used under the GNU Free Documentation License.