Slashdot Log In
NYT Explores the World of Internet Trolls
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Jul 31, 2008 08:18 PM
from the it's-not-a-pretty-place dept.
from the it's-not-a-pretty-place dept.
prostoalex writes "New York Times magazine explores the history and status quo of Internet trolling. They look at the early days of Usenet trolling, current anonymous forums, and social networking pages as the latest venues for trolls: 'In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word troll to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a pseudo-naïve tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.'"
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
First troll (Score:5, Funny)
Im not going to do it... as I know the clever thing for this thread will be to post something off topic, incidiary, and generally annoying to the typical slashdot crowd.
OK, thats enough of that, sitting here typing on my superior-to-linux windows box (thanks microsoft!)
Re:First troll (Score:5, Funny)
Hah, but my single-boot, WGA-empowered, fully patented Vista box with its DRM goodness, playing RIAA-approved music and MPAA-approved movies using RealPlayer, accessing the Internet from within the Chinese Great FireWall with ActiveX-enabled Internet Explorer, and working on OOXML-formated Office documents, is superior than your box.
Parent
Re:First troll (Score:5, Funny)
"Superior to your box", English-language n00b.
-- Grammar, usage, and spelling Nazi, opportunistic division
Parent
I don't get it (Score:5, Funny)
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you superior-to-linux windows box fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a superior-to-linux windows box (a Dell Inspiron w/an NVidia G84 graphics chip) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running Slackware 3.6, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this superior-to-linux windows box, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Virtual Beer Pong will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even my Google face-swapping software is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various superior-to-linux windows boxs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a superior-to-linux windows box that has run faster than its Linux counterpart, despite the superior-to-linux windows boxs' superior NVIDIA graphics chips. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz superior-to-linux windows machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the superior-to-linux windows box is a superior machine.
Superior-to-linux windows box addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a superior-to-linux windows box over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Parent
Re:First troll (Score:5, Funny)
There's a big difference between successful trolling and just making yourself look like a complete idiot.
.....and thank you for showing us that difference.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a big difference between successful trolling and just making yourself look like a complete idiot.
Whoosh. You just got meta-trolled.
New York Times (Score:3, Funny)
Wow, you mean they're still publishing that?
Re:New York Times (Score:5, Funny)
HEY BUDDY I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOUR PROBLEM IS maybe you are STUPID but the NEW YORK TIMES is a good newspaper you should LEARN TO READ instead of being a fat nerd clearly you thought it would be FUNNY to make a joke like that i really hate people like you. right now my daughter who just learned to read is CRYING because of what you posted
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Can you believe it? Its still the best fishwrap in the world.
The NYT is dying (Score:5, Funny)
Netcraft confirms: NYT is dying
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered NYT community when recently IDC confirmed that NYT accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all newspapers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that NYT has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. NYT is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent journalist comprehensive reporting test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict NYT's future. The hand writing is on the wall: NYT faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for NYT because NYT is dying. Things are looking very bad for NYT. As many of us are already aware, NYT continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. NYTimes.com is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
NYT leader Sulzberger states that there are 7000 readers of nytimes.com. How many readers of the Boston Globe are there? Let's see. The number of NY Times versus Boston Globe posts on Usenet (which is also dying, BTW) is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Boston Globe readers. Tuscaloosa Times posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Boston Globe posts. Therefore there are about 700 readers of the Tuscaloosa Times. A recent article put the Sarasota Herald-Tribune at about 80 percent of the NYT market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Sarasota Herald-Tribune readers. This is consistent with the number of Sarasota Herald-Tribune Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of West 1st Street, abysmal sales and that douchebag Sam Zell, the Los Angeles Times went out of business and was taken over by the Chicago Tribune who sell another troubled newspaper. Now the Tribune is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that the NYT has steadily declined in market share. The NYT is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If the NYT is to survive at all it will be among news hobbyist dabblers. The NYT continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the NYT is dead.
Fact: NYT is dead
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:New York Times (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:New York Times (Score:5, Funny)
I was disheartened to not even see a mention of /. in there and how we manage trolling. *sighs*
"We manage it very well," Said someone from /. posting as AC. "In fact we all take turns."
Parent
thanks alot submitter... (Score:4, Funny)
Perhaps you were just conducting an experiment to see who really RTFA, right?
Re: (Score:3)
Nah, asking for registration is just the commercial version of trolling.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Tagged troll in a discussion about trolling... what do I win?
Troll Contest (Score:5, Interesting)
I have already posted once in this thread, and I predict a few troll mod's on it :)
Is there any /. that can refrain from deliberately going after a troll mod in a troll themed post? I doubt it.
In any case trolling is a behavior that predates the Internet by a couple thousand years. I am sure there was more than one ancient drinking hole with an asshole in it that JUST had to say something to get people going. I can see a lot of viking brawls started by comments about who raped the ugly chick.
Of course trolling in the past was a far more dangerous sport. These days you get to do it in your mother's basement with little fear of real reprisal.. which kind of takes the fun out of it a little bit.
Re:Troll Contest (Score:5, Insightful)
Case in point: Socrates. He went around asking people serious and uncomfortable questions. For moderation he was made to drink hemlock. In meta-moderation, pretty much everyone now agrees that moderation was unfair.
Parent
Re:Troll Contest (Score:4, Insightful)
Only an idiot would compare the "art" of trolling to Socrates. Asking serious and uncomfortable questions is not the same as trolling. Socrates intended to provoke discussion to learn and educate. Trolls intend to simply get a reaction, attention, not to educate -- or if they do, they're doing it in a way that is unconstructive.
Parent
Re:But that's not the point (Score:4, Interesting)
[emphasis mine]
Parent
Well, that's the funny thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, if you want to think about history, Socrates was essentially executed for trolling. He kept saying things that challenged the status quo and accepted behaviours, and made his countrymen uneasy. So they executed him.
Later we had people like, say, Galileo. What nowadays is turned into Science-vs-Religion, was actually largely an issue of flaming a totalitarian monarch. The pope was originally Galileo's friend, and encouraged him to write his book. He just asked that he writes about both his system and the new one, and shows what the old one doesn't explain and his does. Pretty much in line with today's scientific method and what we now call Occam's Razor. But Galileo was the stereotypical self-important socially-inept nerd and obviously didn't deal well with the pope's not immediately seeing that he's right and everyone else is wrong. The book took the pope's words, distorted them and put them in the mouth of a character called Simplicius (basically: The Stupid). And that character lives up to his name, by being unable to use even elementary logic right, and getting tripped by his own fallacies. It also incidentally painted the pope as the uber-defender of a model, where he actually was very neutral at the time. (What we today call a strawman.)
In other words: Galileo flamed the pope in public.
What followed was not as much science vs religion, as just abuse of power. The pope didn't took lightly to the thorough flaming, and actually did make the heliocentric model official church position just so he can prosecute Galileo.
I propose to have Galileo sanctified as patron saint of socially inept nerds and flame warriors ;)
But it does kinda illustrate another point I'm trying to make: one man's flaming or trolling, is another man's valuable (if mis-guided) contribution.
Galileo was actually right about his heliocentric model and about the moons of planets, even if his way of presenting it was flawed and annoying.
Socrates, if we're to believe his disciple and biographer, actually did have a point about his contemporary culture. But those who mindlessly adhered to it, felt trolled by someone questioning what they do. (And funnily enough, pulled one of the first "think of the children!" maneuvers in the process. One of the main accusations against Socrates was that he poisoned the minds of the young with his teaching them to question the status quo.)
And you can see the phenomenon in modern times too. You can see people flying off the hook and going into "OMG, I'm being flamed/cyber-bullied/whatever" mode, if you as little as point out a bug in their software or web site. Or since NYT mentions asking newbie questions as a troll tactic, I'll ask the reverse: how many genuine newbies got flamed for asking a newbie question?
Or you can see the phenomenon on Slashdot too. There's plenty of using -1 Troll or -1 Flamebait or -1 Overrated as, basically, "I don't like that idea and want to censor it." Or occasionally, as some comically impotent revenge for not agreeing with someone in a whole other thread. I've even seen quotes from physics textbooks modded as one of the three.
Just something to think about.
Parent
Re:This was how it was done. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well from what I remember crossposting was usually used to create conflicts between opposite groups.
It usually started like "serbs will kick your arse next time" on soc.culture.croatia or "Europeons are sissies and we americans are tired to defend your pathetic... whatever" on soc.culture.europe
And of course croats, europeans would react. Those messages will appear on soc.culture.serbia or soc.culture.america.
And then a thread of pompeous messages will appear and soon or later the word "Nazi", "WW II" will appear en masse.
It was so predictable, boring, "common USENET trolling" was far from being an art to me. The only interesting I've learnt from this is how world war II is present in most people mind all over the world.
Most flamewars were utterly boring too, the ones I remember are FYROM and Macedonia (thx to Greek nationalists who managed to post their insults wherever they could) or Cyprus (between turks and greeks), tamil tigers, pfff and countless of topics. Most of the time their discussion were mostly copying & pasting articles (they usually kept posting the same for months) from the web and then signing them with "greeks are fags" and then somebody would reply "you turks are gay" with another copy/paste article...So interesting really
I was an active user of a group:
talk.politics.european-union or something and that's why I left USENET around 2002. I usually appreciated exchanging arguments with British eursceptics on that group (in a civil manner) but those trolls and nationalists were really an infection.
Parent
Top 2 articles on Google News for trolls are... (Score:3, Interesting)
Stay back! (Score:5, Funny)
Anonymity breeds contempt (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
My experience as a troll tells me it's because most of mankind frankly is -very- stupid, and easily strung along and made to believe incredibly stupid things, or gets angry about things that aren't worth sweating over.
Road rage is often done out of anger, anyway. Trolling is done for laughs. Trolling is more akin to pranking people than trying to get back at them.
"Weev" (Score:5, Funny)
You know, "Weev" on the front page of TFA is EXACTLY what I picture when I think of trolls or that "frosty piss" guy.
Slashcode... (Score:3, Funny)
Is there any option in the slashcode that would allow taco to give trolls a +1 bonus for this article only?
Seems fitting.....
Why don't more forums used comment ratings like /. (Score:5, Interesting)
The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, âoeIf you donâ(TM)t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.â
The problem is much worse these days compared to USENET 20 years ago. Before the web made internet forums mainstream, there weren't as many idiots online and it was easier to spot trolls... nowadays when I see some astonishingly stupid comment, more-often-than-not it's genuine.
And of course the transition from USENET to web-based forums has also had the unfortunate effect of information being redundant and/or more difficult to find. Between that and the sheer volume of trolling/idiotic posts, the usefulness of most online forums has diminished.
Even /. suffers from this to a certain extent, but for the most part its moderation system makes comments a little easier to sift through. Sure sometimes mod points are misused in ideological arguments, but it's still more effective than nothing (and much better than the useless voting system at sites like engadget).
So my question is this: How come other forums don't use a moderation system like /.?
Re:Why don't more forums used comment ratings like (Score:4, Funny)
Most forums today offer some sort of moderation. Plus, I think there's been enough cases of people getting prosecuted in the real world to make everyone a little more toned down. Back in the old days things were a lot more careless. People would regularly make death threats or worse. Later on we also had things like WinNuke when the AOL kiddies started flooding on. Nowadays if you make a threat even in jest you are likely to have the FBI or someone knocking at your door, if you aren't sued. I mean, they're listening to everything so you can pretty safely assume that.
I really think the internet has become much more civil, if anything, since the hundreds of millions of people have started using it. I mean, really. Sure there's the 3-4000 connections to my computer each night by portscanning zombies; there's always a few people making inappropriate comments on slashdot. Hold on, I'm going to go browse at 0 to see how... ...OH MY FUCKING GOD! I was right in the middle of a fucking reptile zoo, and somebody was giving booze to these goddamn things! Won't be long now before they tear us to shreds. DISREGARD THIS POST, AND BUY CONDOMS! FOR YOUR ENTIRE BODY! WHAT HAVE WE DONE?!?!
Parent
One of the best trolls on USENET (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the strangest trolls on USENET is happenning right now on news.admin.net-abuse.email [google.com]. The thing is that instead of ONE individual trolling the froup, about 50 individuals are trolling ONE PERSON, a spammer named Jamie Baillie [google.ca] with extremely poor social skills who is quite abusive and is a legend when it comes to complain to ISPs [google.ca].
The situation has been fluctuating for more than 5 years on news.admin.net-abuse.email [google.com], and currently, the Jamie Baillie activity [google.ca] is at a historic peak.
The "Moon": A Ridiculous Liberal Myth (Score:5, Funny)
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors .. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
For just 3 replies a day (Score:4, Funny)
This is a little Bobby. He lives in his mother's basement pasty white from years without sunlight. Lacking all social skills he patiently waits for replies to his posts with his "I roll twenties" T-Shirt.
Starving for attention little Bobby trolls the Internet. For just 3 posts a day you can feed little Bobby all the negative reinforcement he needs!
Have a heart. Trolls cannot live on Hot Pockets and Cheesy Poofs alone. They need your Help!
Parent
Re:For just 3 replies a day (Score:4, Interesting)
Either that, or perhaps some of us prefer being assholes on the Internet rather than in real life.
Also, if I said some of the things I say here in "real" life, I'd probably lose my job, my house, my family, and 50%+ of my contacts. Wouldn't even matter if most of them are true. In contrast, when I post on slashdot I only lose karma.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
9/10 -- too many questions, which is a tip-off that you're trying very hard to elicit responses. Otherwise a pretty good one.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Everywhere damn it. Windows doesn't need five firewalls and it is Apple who's not been patching lately. Linux is for people who are willing to settle for less than par, Apple is for people who believe in the god Jobs, and Microsoft just generally sucks for their evil business practices and security. Real men use either Amiga or RiscOS and if you don't agree you're a howler monkey with a ball satchel of a neutered cat, now get the hell of my lawn. Cretin.
Golden Age of Trolling (Score:5, Funny)
You had it easy. Back in my day, trolls had to use bridges.
Parent
Re:Kibo. (Score:4, Interesting)
The allowedness of dogs (fictional) and otherwise, or people, and the encompassing nature of certain sigs are certainly complicated things; perhaps superficially ugly, or at least plain. But they may also belie a quixotic universe of complexity. They are the product of not just the stated, but the implied, inferred and unexplored. The most perceptive truths and funniest jokes by their elemental nature aren't things everyone can share in. But for those who do so share, they are a joy. For they know that, in a small way, they have stretched across their small corner of the universe to truly touch the mind of another.
Also Lupus Yonderboy flaming the Doctress Neutropia in the style of the Adam West Batman TV Show is funny.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You might want to check the post you replied to. It's 100% caps yet it passed the filter, giving even more weight to his "what is ingenious about it?" question.
You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd (Score:4, Funny)
At least, that has been my experience on Slashdot. Be a good boy and don't say anything that is politically incorrect because you will be modded down as a troll. LOL. I'm trembling with fear. In some countries, they just hang you.
On Slashdot, you are modded down as a troll if you say anything against Erlang, functional programming, Stephen Hawking, Alan Turing (it is not OK to criticize any homosexual regardless of how wrong they are because that makes you a homophobic), Richard Dawkins, P.Z. Myers, atheism, Darwinism, evolution, time travel, black holes, man-made global warming, the Big Bang, Star-Trek physics, quantum computing, Albert Einstein (it's OK to bash Isaac Newton, though, because he was a God-believing Christian), and more like it.
A time will come soon when Slashdot will be irrelevant and politically incorrect. You will all be known far and wide as a bunch of clueless nerds. LOL.
Just for grins and giggles: Quantum computing is pure crackpottery and a hoax. D-Wave is running a scam and Stephen Hawking is a time travel-believing crackpot. Same with David Deutsch. Now do your dirty work, you fearless Slashdot moderators. ahahaha...
Parent
Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow, this one actually got modded Troll. You struck a nerve there.
Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience being marked as troll in slashdot does not depend on _what_ you say, but on _how_ you say it.
The first times I came here and dared to speak I was modded down half of the time because I was too exited to write clearly and taking the time to justify my reasoning and not to offend the poster I was replying to (or at least to clearly justify why I was offending them).
I looked back at my "Troll" posts and I realized that I was assuming everyone did agree with me from the beginning.
Then I learned and built my karma up. Your post was, more or less, a good argumented post (except for the final provocation, of course), and it was not marked as Troll.
So, no, you are not a troll if you disagree with the crowd, you are a Troll if you treat people who disagree with you like dumb ignorant and insult them. Explain what you mean to them and they will mark you "Interesting" (or maybe just ignore you) most of the time.
Parent
Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd (Score:5, Funny)
Conversely, you're modded up if you're a female who says she dates nerds.
Parent
Re:frosty piss (Score:5, Funny)
NSFW Warning: Contains nudity.
Parent
Re:Once again the dead tree press screws ups a... (Score:5, Funny)
A real troll is a work of art
A real troll is an adolescent mind who wants to feel superior by having emotional control over a group of people, probably because they can't get it in meatspace.
There, fixed that for you.
Parent
Re:GNAA (Score:4, Funny)
Oh Fuck
GNAA Just got modded funny
World is burning
Four horsemen spotted
Film at Eleven.
Parent