I think part of the problem is the filtering model means I lose out too. Most people who aren't following Grendel won't repost his stuff. And he has tons of followers. So if I filter all of the Team Sexist Racist Crazytown, yes I'm in a safe bubble from the hate speech. I'm also going to miss out on quite a lot of content, which hubski doesn't have a ton of right now. Look at the active users in the community tab. Look at grendels followers. Yeesh.

It's the same thing that happened on reddit. I had to avoid the hate subs, obviously. But eventually I had to unsub from the defaults, as the hate subs actively campaign there. Then as they grew to a more majority opinion, the few subs that were supposed to be safe were invaded, and I left the site. That's exactly what the hate subs wanted, and I'm pretty sure what Grendel wants as well.

If grendel continues to recruit, which I believe is his main goal here, yes he is punished by being ignored, but I'm punished by missing out on lots of content, more and more as his popularity grows.

I have a few ideas of things that would help. I think the community should be able to remove tags from a post. If he wasn't allowed to spam feminism with the exact opposite it would help keep him isolated. It would help prevent users from thinking his manipulative behavior represents whichever tag he is currently abusing. I also think the proposed user tagging would help. If I can tag his followers as "possibly crazy" it would help avoid getting drawn in by trolling.

I think if the site as a whole comes up with some smart ways to minimize his damage then he's done hubski users a lot of good. To me, he's a bug, an edge case, and it's just a matter of finding the right policy to deal with his exploitation. But if the answer is "ignore it" I'm concerned what that means for my future here.