Does the SE network have an effective process in place to deal with aggressively toxic users?

Question

I welcome any details that can be shared, but I understand if there are specifics that cannot be. I am primarily interested in whether the process exists, rather than what that process is.

What's been happening:

In the last few months, and especially the last week or so it seems, there is a particular user that has been blatantly abusive of the Stack Overflow site. They post questions tagged with the C# tag that seem superficially reasonable, but which are at best overly vague and poorly researched, and at worst are really just a "word salad" of click-bait programming words like "object", "boxed", "heap", "literal", "reference", and more.

Not only do the questions not contribute, the user then takes advantage of their lack of clarity, which always induces other users to post comments asking for clarification, to drag those other users into extended, fruitless discussions in the comments under the post.

If someone should happen to answer the question, this user then takes that opportunity to start the same sort of extended, fruitless discussion in the comments under that post.

In my view, this seems like straight-up trolling. I will admit, it's more sophisticated than a lot of trolling is (maybe even aided by a linguistic AI to compose these questions…that would explain all the buzz-words that when put together don't really mean much). But it's trolling, nonetheless.

Initially, it sufficed to just downvote and close the questions. But this quickly escalated to the user creating multiple user accounts, posting the same question using different accounts (and probably sock-puppet-voting on them too). When the community got wise to that tactic, they got abusive. They posted abusive comments, and even edited the questions themselves to include abusive language, including death threats.

Every time they create a new user and others post comments calling them on it, they lie and pretend that they are a brand new user, never having visited the site before. This lie doesn't last long though, because they soon after devolve into insulting the community members who are voting, flagging, and commenting on the posts, revealing themselves to be the same.

Suffice to say, such a user has no place on the Stack Exchange network at all.

What I know has been done about it:

The community has done a good job keeping up with the posts. They now get closed and deleted soon after posted, often within minutes. Moderators are apparently on top of things too; while I don't get any specific feedback on the matter, my flags are marked "Helpful" and the accounts created by the user have been suspended, and eventually deleted (of course, I don't know if the latter happens by the user themselves or by moderation staff).

But is it enough, and what else can the site do about it?

It would not surprise me at all if Stack Exchange had a mechanism for banning users by IP address. But as we all know, it's not hard to get around such bans. Use of a VPN or Tor can easily bypass a ban like that, unless Stack Exchange is willing to ban whole VPN services and Tor exit nodes.

If I recall correctly, creation of a user account requires that the user provide an email address. But of course, there are plenty of ways to get throw-away email addresses.

Because the Internet is so accommodating of anonymity, and because of the relatively open policies for Stack Exchange (i.e. nothing that requires any sort of reliable proof of identification…to be clear, I'm not proposing that this openness change), it may be impossible to verify a user's true identity in any reliable way. So in theory, a persistent user could just keep bypassing ban after ban after ban, continuing to harass the community.

From my point of view, not knowing the behind-the-scenes capabilities of Stack Exchange and its staff, it seems to me there are only two strategies we can really take here:

• Give up. Let the user post. Let other users post answers and then suffer the endless comment discussions. Hope that the more-active users will all eventually get wise, and that the less active-users won't have to interact often enough with the user for it to be a real problem for them.
• Keep moderating the posts and the user into oblivion. This is very time- and resource-intensive, but it keeps that particular mess off the site. For now, the user seems perfectly happy to just keep trolling, but I'm sure that as with every troll in the history of the Internet, they will eventually get bored of whatever thrill they were getting and go away.

I don't find either of these strategies particularly gratifying, but I do admit that they seem like possibly the only reliable approach.

Other than the above, is there actually anything else the Stack Exchange sites can do about users like this? Are there in fact other actions being taken behind the scenes that can more reliably put an end to the abuse of the site by users like this?

Answer 1

So, I do not moderate on Stack Overflow, but rather Code Golf, and I will offer a bit of insight. Maybe I'm allowed to share more, but this is just what I think I'm reasonably comfortable publicly talking about, since giving away all of our tools to the public is a great way to get exploited even more.

Due to SE's core policies about allowing anyone to participate, like you said, it does also result in more negative or harmful activity. Now, there are systems against this, such as automatic IP bans like you suggested. However, with VPNs and TOR, throwaway temporarily email address generators, and things like that, it's hard to properly filter out people we don't want on SE ever again without harming others' ability to contribute - or even at all, without caring about the latter group. I won't go into much detail about the mod tools we have available, but even with them, obviously no system is perfect.

Now, to address the question of what more can we do? Not much, to be completely honest. If it's getting serious enough to the point that the moderators are being totally overwhelmed and can't stop it, we can raise issues up to the Community Team and they have more extensive measures they can take against things like this that aren't available to us.

Until then... just keep flagging and reporting. It's annoying, yes, but the tools for us to get rid of problematic users don't actually take a whole lot of effort to use, it's just that SO, even with 24 mods, is so active that they're always busy. In fact, the effort a troll needs to go through to bypass bans, bypass all restrictions, try to evade moderators, and keep trolling is much more difficult than the few buttons I need to press to put that all to waste. So, most trolls eventually find it's not worth it.

We've dealt with things like this on the network before. In fact, there are persistent trolls that are still around. I hope this troll gets bored and goes on to do something useful with their life, but some never do. We can only keep using the tools available to us to keep the noise ratio on SE as low as possible. No system will ever be perfect, and we'll never be able to screen out all trolls before they can post or even get rid of all negative content retroactively. We just need to do our best.

So don't worry too much about it. There isn't much special that can or needs to be done. Trolls that get bad enough will eventually face the wrath of the CMs, but removing trolls is a constant process. After all, if the system was perfect at preventing bad things, we wouldn't be needed here :)

Answer 2

There's not much you can do when the reward for the hyper-fixation is the fixation.

There are some folks that simply never get tired of throwing stuff at the wall, and they will continue doing it relentlessly as long as they're able.

Stack Overflow has seen a dozen or so of these folks in its lifetime, some of them only stopped because they sought (or were required to seek) long-term care for the underlying causes of that behavior. Some instances resulted in folks fixating on certain users and employees and, as someone once on the receiving end of it as both, I can relate to how exhausting it can become.

My best advice in those cases is to do exactly as you stated - summarily delete the content and terminate the accounts and just hope that the person or persons responsible eventually lose the ability to so easily cycle through them. I don't want an internet tied to identity, so I understand this is just necessary work that people have to do in order to keep it that way as long as we can.

Then, there's "researchers"

... and you do have to keep a watchful eye out for them. They will conduct breaching experiments of every conceivable kind and their motives are seldom clear. Stack Overflow is huge, as are some of the network sites and very conducive to this kind of research.

Generally, researchers look at past interactions that you can fill in from the public database dumps, but some actively see how certain kinds of interactions change outcomes given the same setting.

If mods spot patterns (like university IP ranges, emails, etc) they can and do involve staff to see if those involved really know the impact of their disruptions on volunteers - and it can escalate further.

But that's more to make you feel better, not necessarily as a prescription to stop it.

Yeah, it's an ancillary cost of not wanting to create even more friction for people that want to legitimately use the sites. I completely agree with others in saying that most of this type of behavior just stops, usually within days, seldom weeks or more.

But when it gets past 'weeks or more' it can (unfortunately) mean a bit of a long haul.

Answer 3

There's a pretty consistent fact about dealing with trolls...almost all trolls eventually get bored and leave. The amount of effort required to continually evade bans only for their posts to be summarily deleted with very little reach just isn't worth what little attention they get. The asymmetry between the effort required for a moderator to nuke their post and account (a couple clicks) and the effort required to evade moderation helps a lot here. Even the community just needs six red flags (see the "What effects do these flags have on a post?" section of this answer) to remove any post and alert the system of what the user's up to.

I can count on one hand the number of trolls (plus another hand if you count spammers) determined enough to keep posting after any non-trivial amount of time with all of their posts getting removed.

Thus, there generally isn't a need for anything special. If a troll is determined enough to get on that list of a handful of people, they eventually become known to community managers who make sure that all of their posts are removed from the network (obviously not going to name any such trolls, because, well, feeding trolls is bad).