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Why Trolls and Flames Happen
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Nov 19, 2007 02:06 PM
from the some-things-will-never-change dept.
from the some-things-will-never-change dept.
AnonymousHack writes "New Scientist examines why people are in general more rude and abusive online. 'Psychologically, we are "distant" from the person we're talking to and less focused on our own identity. As a result we're more prone to aggressive behavior' says one psychologist, who also cites research showing messages received by email are always perceived more negatively than on the phone." Just more proof for the Greater Internet F***wad Theory.
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Submission: Why trolls and flames happen by Anonymous Coward
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Duh. (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, come on! That just isn't fair.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
You haven't really achieved anything on Slashdot until you've ended up with a final moderation of (Score 4, Troll).
Re:Duh. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Geez...I need my money back...
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Funny)
Awesome, a thread where we can be unlimitedly rude and still be on topic.
Parent
Re:Duh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it another sign of the decline -faith-based, pseudo-science- under the rule of Caligula Bush?
The Thomas Friedman "worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit" [buffalobeast.com] seems to have completely sucked the last gasp of life out of any significant intellectual effort in the public arena.
Parent
Re:Duh. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
destination. admitting this fact should help insure a good online rudness index...
USENET Trolls, among others (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a newsgroup, perhaps not too unlike many others, where a troll has taken up residence. He insults members and has found some method of posting every few minutes a lot of gibberish under various names and forged addresses.
This person is a degree or two off the usual troll who just likes to make some preposterous post and watch people take the bait and go. This one is actively trying to destroy the group with crap-flooding and there appears little members can do about it. There's also some halfwit posting MI5 [google.com] crap across many newsgroups. Alas, Google News doesn't appear to allow filtering. Does reporting abuse every work?
Some newsgroups are still alive and thriving, but others seem to be losing regular posters to blog sites, I expect because they are freed from the harrassment of trolls, spammers and crapflooders by a moderator who will simply delete their garbage.
My ISP had a NEWS server, but shut it down for economic reasons and pointed out I could just use Google News. Feh.
I've given some thought over the weekend whether USENET can survive and whether anonymity also can survive. The more people abuse a system, the less eventual resistance there will be to the heavy hand of moderators or even government. I expect at some point bills requiring tagging and tracking of every email and every post on the internet being required by law with few people actually coming to the defence of anonymity, because they have had their own fill of trolls an crackers. It may come in on the wind of some means of fighting terrorism or protection of IP (a la RIAA & MPAA, among others) but it will encompass all.
Anonymous Cowards enjoy the present. I think the trolls are undermining us all and they really don't care if they lose anonymity and privacy, they're called trolls for a reason.
Lastly, no, this isn't a troll. Notice I didn't post anonymously. I am genuinely concerned about this as I lament the ills befalling open forms such as USENET and email.
Re:USENET Trolls, among others (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.getfirefox.com/ [getfirefox.com]
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748 [mozilla.org]
http://www.penney.org/ggkiller.html [penney.org]
Parent
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Yeah, I used to frequent to comp.os.linux.advocacy to enjoy quality time reading the flames and trolls... that was until slashdot became my main source for those.
Hmmm (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
And that's different from any other slashdot story exactly how? Go for "funny" and you get "insightful". Go for "offtopic" and you get "funny." Go for troll and you get this [kuro5hin.org].
That link from 2003, BTW, is about OFFLINE trolling, proving these bozos wrong.
-mcgrew
PS- Since you are a nerd, it is your duty to troll the cave man jocks [slashdot.org]
More **everything** online (Score:5, Insightful)
This is all to be expected. "Civilaised society", whatever that means, comes from feedback. That feedback is significantly reduced by a computer interaction or by excessive alcohol etc. resulting in less inhibited behaviour online or when pissed.
many people think negative criticism is a troll. (Score:3, Interesting)
for example, that when people post their opinion anything
negative is seen as a troll or a flame.
They go into the post thinking this is fun not realizing
that criticism should be welcome and can improve them as
a collector.
Or another person may simply not like their coin, see problems
with it they do not, or know they paid too high a price.
All this combined makes others think they are being negative
for no good reason and should have simply ignored the post
and moved on.
I disagree with these people who have thin skin and should
be happy they got honest feedback from someone who could
very well know much more then them.
Hey, as long as they do not use name-calling they should be
free to be as negative about the topic as they like. I find
i learn more from the negative comments that get discussed
then from the people who simply say, "nice coin" just to be nice.
Re:many people think negative criticism is a troll (Score:2, Funny)
What about Richard Stallman? (Score:2)
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This is nothing new (Score:3, Interesting)
That's BS (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That's BS (Score:5, Funny)
I do not!
Parent
Let me take a wild guess here.... (Score:4, Funny)
WTF? People are rude everywhere. Now don't get me wrong, dear reader. Of course I do not mean you, but the two idiots on either side of your cubicle, yes THEM, those hideous bastards and their soccer practicing spouses.
Clearly, this research team did all their research reading emails inside a nice warm coffee shop in Seattle, AND if you lift the rock off their heads, I'm betting both ears are flattened.
By the way, Flat Ear Syndrome (FES) has been diagnosed as affecting 1 in three research scientists by doctors at UCLA and WSU. Pfizer, working closely with the Bursars office of these highly respected institutes, has develope UnfesION, that relieves the symptoms of FES in 1 out of 16 patients with no dramatic side effects. Note: consult with your physician before taking UnfesION. Side effects may include; sudden outbreaks of common sense, clarity of vision, actual merit based grant funding, possible curricular related job opportunities, and possible respect among the greater community.
If the commentator were a bot ... (Score:2)
Otherwise, I would recommend some reading, this [google.com] search gives a good start.
CC.
I further theorize... (Score:2)
that this kind of "emotional distance" is behind ganking [wikipedia.org].
And not the fact that my WoW character's name is Gnomestompy.
Although that seems to piss off a lot of gnomes.
Able to vent. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd like to add: or be fired, yelled a by your wife, etc....
Commenting online is a why to vent anger at at shit you can't normally vent at. I've seen many comment here about how "stupid" their management or users are/is. And I bet, most of the time, folks wouldn't talk like that at work - but they do here. I think being online is a way to deal with aggression. In short, I'd rather have you folks flame me, or whatever, online than shoot me at work.
terse does not mean rude (Score:5, Interesting)
This is in contrast to spoken communication, which is much easier to assimilate and can therefore go on for longer. It also contains more emotion than simple writing, so the actual words are less important than the intonation - which is almost completely missing from text.
People frequently mistake short comments for either sarcasm or impatience and this gives the impression that written communication (esp. in email, netnews) that the writer does not respect the audience.
I beleive this is incorrect, when I insult someone they will be left in no doubt they have been insulted. I think over time, most people will come to realise the difference between rudeness and terseness. There will always be a few however, who take exception at everything. there's no helping these individuals.
Re:terse does not mean rude (Score:4, Funny)
There will always be a few however, who take exception at everything. there's no helping these individuals.
I'm one of those individuals, you insensitive clod!
Parent
Old News (Score:2)
No, people are just stupid. (Score:2)
the answer is simple (Score:3, Funny)
No need to overanalyze this (Score:2)
what a load of fucking horseshit (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, how very fucking _interesting_! Sounds just like the kind of impartial, thoughtful introduction that heralds a fucking well-balanced scientific curio doesn't it? It's on an intellectual par with Schrödinger postulating about quantum mechanics because his damned cat wouldn't stop shitting on the carpet. Bra-fucking-vo.
>My pet theory about why people behave so rudely is that online commenting is treated, by most people, like a pub conversation
Oh yeah? Well _my_ pet theory is that you're fucking retarded. What's your local pub? The "make up spurious claims & expect people to be interested in them"?
>After being described a few weeks ago as "a self-lobotomised liberal who can't face the facts", I decided to look into the psychology of online behaviour a bit further.
You don't need a shitting psychology decree to know that's called fucking rampart narcissism, you self-interested jackass.
>Psychologically, we are "distant" from the person we're talking to and less focused on our own identity. As a result we're more prone to aggressive behaviour, he says.
Well that's fucking retarded, all I can think about when reading your mastabatory drivel is how awesome I am in comparison.
>Another factor influencing online communication, according to Epley, is simply the risk of miscommunication involved with text-based messages, which are inherently more ambiguous.
Nothing ambiguous about how much of a shit-eating moron you are, you must be a master of textual precision.
>Another obvious factor is that, if you insult someone online, it's unlikely you'll face any physical retaliation for it.
Look at brave Mr. New-Scientist-Blogger! People won't insult him in _real_ _life_ because if they do, he fucks their shit up for them! If he invents a way to stab people in the face over the internet, I'm in real fucking trouble.
>I'm not sure what we can do to minimise miscommunication and abuse online. But being aware that we're not as good at communication online as we'd like to think seems like a good start. I know I often have to restrain myself from joining in.
Didn't fucking restrain yourself hard enough did you? Didn't fucking restrain yourself hard enough, or I wouldn't be reading this peice of vomit you call an article.
Psychology is a hard science too! (Score:5, Insightful)
Whilst I was fascinated with the impossibly hard questions that my chosen fields of study were setting out to unravel and comprehend
And yet somehow, professional Psychology academics would manage to get substantial grants to go ahead and prove such theories as "If someone is smacked over the head every day for the next 5 years, then they are more likely to believe that they are going to get smacked over the head tomorrow - compared to someone who has never been smacked over the head at all". Such theories could be proven (at great expense mind you) using the most thorough and rigorous statistical analysis.
Woop Dee do.
I made a comment to the head of the Psych department that Psychology was nothing more than the vieled scientific study of the completely fucking obvious. My grades in this particular subject towards the end of that year reflect that fact as well. Some of the other students in my psych group who handed up almost verbatim copies of the same written work during the same period predictably fared better in their marks.
OK then, so now we find that you can take a normal person off the street, give them anonymity and an audience - and viola - without the constraints of dealing with people face to face, with no embarrassment to deal with, they tend to get obnoxious. And this is news ? The big question is - how many months of study, and how much grant money was sucked up in proving this most valuable theory ?
Its amazing that we ever managed to build the pyramids, discover mathematics, communicate wirelessly across the globe, understand the quantum states of the atom, put a man on the moon, or map out the human genome
Where would we be without Psychology ?
One theory, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Next time you're dealing with some Internet troll, don't get angry. Just bring to your minds' eye the truth: it's a junior highschooler angry at his lack of power in his own life and taking it out on the Internet community. It's a lot less frustrating when you see it as kids being kids.
This, incidentally, is why I favor privacy, but not total anonymity. Either keep kids out of the online arena entirely or label them somehow; they bring down the maturity of the discussion as a whole.
John Gabriel's Internet Fuckwad Theory (Score:3, Funny)
Fists Work (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:And then there are the people who are opinionat (Score:2, Interesting)
And regard off-kilter research like this as flawed not just in its basic design, but unproveable by any statistically sound method, using self-selected groups of college students who tend to like to flame more than the general population, and to whom trash-talking is an art, not a crime.
But that's the real world viewpoint.
A bit over 20 years ago I found the first open and anonymous form of many I'd see, at college. Eventually I was hired on as a programmer and rewrote the system for greater capacity and enabling cursor animations in messages (it was pretty cool, honestly.) The thing that seemed to happen almost immediately, though, was flame wars (don't mention 'gun control') and some trolling. I think it is pretty simple human nature to speak more openly or play villain when there's a poor chance of getting caught. It
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's really not true though. I mean, if you track down a really macho belligerent guy and determinedly heckle him in front of his friends, maybe you'll evoke a violent response. But the vast majority of the time, when you insult or act offensively to a stranger you'll get one of two responses:
- They'll ignore you or otherwise try to avoid confrontation.
- They'll express anger or threaten you aggressively, but not follow through.
People always want to ma
or paid to be rude. (Score:2, Troll)
Some companies "compete" that way [essential.org]. They break other people's things and conversations because they don't have anything better to offer.
(That should do it) (Score:2)
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I take your Ron Paul and Raise you (Score:2)
Ok, I'll go back to my corner now....
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
How was that?
Re:a goal for you guys (Score:4, Funny)
There... that ought to do it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)