If your only argument for witch hunts is essentially that real witches deserve to be hunted, you have understood neither what the problem with historical witch hunts was, nor what the problem with metaphorical witch hunts nowadays is.
- The evidence against the witch is mostly very circumstantial and can't be verified by the general public.
- Only the witch-hunting party is able to present any evidence.
- And despite both those points, the burden of proof is essentially placed on the "witch". If she can't prove her innocence, she is guilty in the eyes of the public (or historically: guilty in the eyes of the public and the authority).
Even if one believes that a troll deserves to be publicly shamed (which is an understandable but still debatable point of view) the problem at its core is that it's impossible to verify in all but very few fringe cases whether somebody actually is a troll.
It's not about protecting witches/trolls, it's about protecting people from being (in some cases maliciously) accused of being witches/trolls and being subjected not to a fair trial but to the equivalent of a lynch mob.
There is a reason why somebody's guilt is not decided by the general public (and as a small sidenote: even the concept of a jury deciding over somebody's guilt is pretty weird in countries without them)
Now you could ask "but what about the really obvious cases?"
The first problem with that is that it's difficult to really draw a line there. A lot of people come to these forums being completely convinced that their case is very obvious, even when it is not. Apart from the negative effects that can have, this also makes moderating super hard:
Those people can believably claim that they thought it was obvious, so it's not even really possible to punish those people for what may very well have been a malicious attempt to tarnish somebody's reputation. It also makes it much more difficult for mods to even judge whether a thread should be deleted in the first place, which will inevitably result in inconsistent decisions by mods.
The second problem is that the chance that a particular individual runs into a troll (low-ish chance), that they have happened to read about on the forums (really low chance) and that was one of the few verifiable trolls (extremely low chance) is so abysmal that the benefit for any individual person in those cases is virtually non-existent.
The chance that somebody runs into a troll that they "heard about" on the forums, supplied with some circumstantial evidence, on the other hand, is… well... still low. But it's significantly higher than the previous chance.
But those cases will beyond any doubt include people who are actually not trolls, which ultimately results in a negative effect on both parties, as everybody involved has their queue time increased without any valid reason. Worse still: The chance that an individual runs into a "troll" they read about on the forums is significantly lower than the chance of that "troll" running into somebody who has heard about them.
So the benefit that people can make an actually well-informed decision to dodge a verifiable troll is extremely low, while there is the low - but realistic - chance that both the target and the readers of a thread are being inconvenienced by somebody who - best case - was holding a grudge, or - worst case - had malicious intent.
So, now that somebody has given you a legitimate reason not to allow this…
Is that really worth it to you?
