You can let one jeering, unpleasant jerk hang around for a
while, but the minute you get two or more of them egging each other
on, they both have to go, and all their recent messages with them.
There are others like them prowling the net, looking for just that
kind of situation. More of them will turn up, and they’ll
encourage each other to behave more and more outrageously. Kill
them quickly and have no regrets.
I would have to call this the most important rule for long-term
survival. The failure to effectively quash the jerks is what's made
Metafilter so painfully unreadable in the past couple of years. But
any sufficiently large community, left unpoliced, will fall to
trolls sooner or later. (The tipping point size is left as an
exercise for the reader.)
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