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People do this to draw out subtle trolls into more egregious behavior that might draw actual action from mods. You're saying, then, that you genuinely intend to actually enforce rule 4? Because looking through the modlog, there is virtually zero enforcement of it, despite trolling existing in this community.
Tons of rule 3 enforcement, some rule 1, 2 and 6. Very little rule 4. Now, could we say that low effort and trolling comments are not made on here? I think that's pretty obviously not the case. So ... what's the deal with having the rule then?
You ban for mod criticism and parody accounts more than you ban for low effort or trolling. What's the deal? Is there question about what constitutes trolling? Is it the libertarian lean of a portion of the mod team? Is it just a catch-all rule to allow you to ban people you want to ban but that haven't broken another rule? The ruleset and modding of this community is on the inconsistent side in this regard, and I do think we would benefit from a little more transparency into your thinking and methodology overall.
Ultimately, trolling should be policed, due to the corrosive effect it has on the overall quality of community engagement. When one person is fucking around, other people become less likely to take the activity seriously, this is very natural. Anyone who went to school is probably familiar with the phenomenon. There was even a post in technology the other day about some researchers that got some hard data on the effects of positive and negative feelings of chat room participants towards user behavior, and it matched what I imagine is most people's anecdotal understanding. So, why is anti-trolling enforcement here so lax?
edit: Thread on the research, in case anyone missed it:
https://feddit.org/post/4067200
edit2: Has anyone on the mod team ever been a troll? Ever intentionally engaged in trolling in an online community with a goal of creating negative feelings in its users? If not, that could explain why you have difficulty recognizing the signs.
What if the person 'drawing out subtle trolls' actually ends up looking like they are, themselves, doing the trolling? After all, they're trying to escalate a situation into being rude, and this tends to occur by being - at the very least - heavily obnoxious.
More than looking like. It very much is trolling a troll.
Then I agree with the mod who says to report and not engage.
I do as well, on the assumption that the mods will take an overall harsher stance on the activity. If enforcement remains lax, though, then nothing will change.
Trolling is a hard one to prove, internet slapfights are self evident.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
That just benefits trolls who play along the line of plausible deniability. Or "I'm not touching you" as you called it. Without stricter enforcement of the rule, then no one has any incentive to report and move on. People will need to press the people into going full-troll in order for mods to step in, at which point it seems like it will wind up being treated like how schools punish everyone involved in a fight, even though one person clearly is bullying.
Courts get around difficult to prove things all the time. That's just life, sometimes things are hard to prove. This does not mean we give up and stop trying. Since you're hunan beings that will inevitably err, is it necessary to err on the side of allowance in all these cases? If so, this will prohibit you from enforcing the rule, in which case it should be removed to avoid the creation of false expectations and getting your community pissed off at you for misrepresentation of your intentions.
If you want to try, how about the usage of logical fallacies? It is virtually impossible to effectively troll without utilizing especially strawman arguments, UM did that all the time. Since they are rooted in logic they are reliably identifiable.
I'll also note that part of rule 4 is low-effort comments, that's another reasonable, if subjective, metric. Though I genuinely would simply remove that as a rule, since I'm getting the sense you intended it more as a guideline, as rule 5 seems to be. Perhaps the sidebar could have a "rules" section and a "guidelines" section?
What I'm really curious about now is your guys' vision and goals for this community. Is it a free-wheeling, largely free speech zone where we should have a good time? It is a serious space for serious discussions of serious topics? You understand it cannot be both, each type of content drives the people that like the other one away. It'd be like a restaurant trying to be a posh, upscale place but only selling cheap hotdogs. It won't work well, in any competitive environment that would fail, it has to pick one goal.
Whichever it is, I would recommend you reassess how the rules are structured. The way things are right now, you are creating expectations and they are not being met. This creates a sense of disappointment in the user base, and it can be easily remedied by simply managing customer expectations better. Reformat the rules to represent what you are both capable of and willing to do, and then stick to them. This way people can understand what they are getting when they come here.
Perhaps it's my flaw as a human being, but I lean on the side of believing people are genuine until proven otherwise.
When bad behavior SEEMS apparent, I hold until it's definitely apparent.
See the latest action on I_Voted_For_Goldwater. 3 hours after account creation I was talking with the other mods going "Well, start the clock until this user becomes a problem..."
Then they created The_Donald and started trolling, banning people left and right.
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&modId=10940202
Yeah, that didn't take long:
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=10940202
That will definitely run into trouble any time we get a somewhat intelligent, but destructive person. They can and will take advantage of that, as their intelligence allows them to predict what other people will be watching out for. It's no different from a bully making sure their bullying never crosses a line that the teachers will notice, but still successfully spreading the suffering. You've become that teacher that only stops the big fights but allows the rest. It's just not easy stuff, that's all, for that teacher or for mods.
My first trolling was when I was a kid, I played Starcraft on battle.net. This was before even Brood Wars. I was a very angry teen, a little bit sadistic, and I liked making people suffer as much as I felt I suffered in my daily life. So I would go into 5v3 cpu matches, that's 5 humans vs 3 AIs. These were very laid back matches, people just relaxing and shooting the shit, super easy. I would backstab them, always making sure my team lost. I enjoyed it, it was fun. For me, not them. I was a bully, and it was all about that feeling of power that I completely lacked in real life.
I did a lot more as I got older, I graduated to more harmful things than pissing off Starcraft players. I eventually grew out of it, of course, I'm no longer a little shit. But it was fun to ruin the fun of other people. Hurting people is fun. It feels good to hurt people. That's the problem.
I understand wanting to give people the benefit of the doubt though, especially while we remain a fairly small community. I really would consider using logical fallacies as a litmus test. That will catch all but the best of them. It's very hard for me to intentionally piss you off solely with rhetoric if I can't pretend you're something you're not, and can't put words in your mouth.
And besides, a little more public education on logical fallacies wouldn't hurt. A short temp ban for strawman probably wouldn't really piss off someone if they did it by accident. It'd be kinda meh, whatever. If they kept doing it, that's a troll with very high certainty. Otherwise they'd learn, it's not a complicated concept to grasp.
Now that UM is gone, he's a fantastic example to look back at, incidentally. We have strong evidence of him being a conservative: He made around a half dozen posts to the local Conservatives community maybe a month ago. Was affiliated with BYU, which is a Mormon university that mandates religious education, you cannot be admitted to that college without a ranking religious figure writing you a letter of recommendation, it's part of their admissions process. He would post Fox News links.
Yet despite that all, he consistently claimed positions that, if true, would have made such environments deeply unpleasant. That's all circumstantial, though. It's not proof. But if you go through his comment history, you will find TONS of strawman arguments. He loved telling other people what they were, what they were doing, what they were saying. He would not listen to a person saying what they were, what they were doing, what they were saying. He would tell them, as if he understood them better than their own words. Strawman, all over the place.
edit: Just thought I'd add, it looks like UM tried to get around his recent ban with a new alt. This time he started up a community called "Conservative Voices".