The craziest thing happens when Mods step up to the plate and enforce TOS: Harassment/bullying stops.

I've seen it play out a few times. Trolls crawl away pretty quickly once they realize their hand-crafted, artisanal insults against other memers are destined to be nuked.

Despite what you may have heard from self-professed "free speech absolutists," harassment/trolling is against ImgFlip TOS. The Global MODs don't always do a great job containing it, but Stream MODs should feel empowered to do so regardless.

And we often hear that the targets of harassment should "just deal with it." It's good advice, of course, but it doesn't negate the troll's share of blame, and not everyone is able to do that. There is a real person behind every screen-name (Russian bots excepted), and we don't know their life situation.

Roll safe and just be a nice person when interacting with others online. It's not that hard to do. We all learned how to communicate respectfully from our mothers, or we should have.

Trolling is not against the rules here. It's the internet. Trolling is a art.

We definitely take "harass" and "make it less fun for other people" seriously when moderating, but they are ambiguous phrases and left open to our interpretation, since otherwise everyone would accuse everyone of harassment and 90% of accounts would be deleted. If an account is obviously just advertising or berating everyone and not participating genuinely in the community we'll delete it right away. We're not here to overly coddle users though, so every user is still responsible for how they interact and should learn how to conduct themselves online in a respectful way.

Thanks for the explanation.

I agree “harassment” and “make it less fun for other people” are phrases open to interpretation, and probably need to be in order to respond to situations on a case-by-case basis.

To some extent harassment seems to be one of those “know it when you see it” type-things, just as porn was once famously defined.

But I’ll try to offer a definition anyway. I’d define “harassment” as this: ongoing, persistent insults by one user against another, especially when spanning multiple memes and comment threads. That may not be an all-encompassing definition of harassment, but it’s a start.

“Trolling” is even broader than that I suppose — it can include harassment, but not necessarily. I guess you can troll without harassing. Trolling can even be constructive, potentially. I’m sure plenty out there would call me a troll. Not sure I can offer a great definition of the concept of trolling right now.

"Just staying out of it" and not doing anything is an option that seems superficially attractive, but it's impossible to stay neutral on a subject like harassment. Choosing *not* to take action is its own kind of choice. And it's one that favors the troll.

When harassment/trolling is not contained on a website, then the lower forms of "reasoning" indicated in this chart begin to take hold. Those who engage in the higher forms of communication get disillusioned and eventually leave. It's a vicious cycle.

ImgFlip is not as toxic a place as, say, 4Chan or certainly 8Chan (where all the crazies too crazy for even 4Chan to tolerate got booted). But there are troubling signs of ImgFlip's potential to devolve into an online cesspit including from certain users and certain streams that I will not mention by name here.

ImgFlippers with a positive mindset and respectful attitude toward others should speak up about these issues at every opportunity.