NYT Explores the World of Internet Trolls 423
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.'"
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!)
New York Times (Score:3, Funny)
Wow, you mean they're still publishing that?
Re:First troll (Score:1, Funny)
thanks alot submitter... (Score:4, Funny)
Perhaps you were just conducting an experiment to see who really RTFA, right?
Re:Troll Contest (Score:2, Funny)
PLEASE EXPLAIN! CAPSLOCK REPITITION FILTER FAIL! (Score:0, Funny)
Re:New York Times (Score:2, Funny)
You must be thinking of the New York Post.
Or perhaps its affiliate, the Hot Sex Weekly.
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
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!
Stay back! (Score:5, Funny)
"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.
GNAA (Score:1, Funny)
Are you gay?
Are you a Nigger?
Maybe you should join the Gay Nigger Alliance of America (GNAA).
(insert goatse spam here)
Re:New York Times (Score:2, Funny)
Soooo, you're an NYT subscriber then?
Re:Does trolling happen on Macs too? (Score:3, Funny)
Golden Age of Trolling (Score:5, Funny)
You had it easy. Back in my day, trolls had to use bridges.
Re:PLEASE EXPLAIN! CAPSLOCK REPITITION FILTER FAIL (Score:2, Funny)
Trolling R&D!
Hi, I'm New Here (Score:0, Funny)
Hi, I'm New Here
Re:thanks alot submitter... (Score:3, Funny)
Tagged troll in a discussion about trolling... what do I win?
Re:trolled (Score:3, Funny)
Obligatory Family Guy trolling (Score:2, Funny)
Jets sucks, Knicks sucks, Yankees sucks, Krypton sucks.
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.....
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.
Re:For just 3 replies a day (Score:2, Funny)
Either that, or perhaps some of us prefer being assholes on the Internet rather than in real life.
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH! More inane cowardly blathering here.
WRONG! I am most definately an ASSHOLE in real life, and you are a coward if you are afraid of saying something in real life.
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...
Troll Cars (Score:2, Funny)
A good troll is like a powerful car, he takes off so quickly that you can't really keep up and you might not have known he was there. A bad troll is like a rice burner, you laugh at him trying to be like a fast car and it's retarded-looking.
Oh yeah, and Microsoft is awesome, Linux will die in 2009, Bush was the best president ever, and Internet memes are cool.
Re:frosty piss (Score:5, Funny)
NSFW Warning: Contains nudity.
Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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.
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?!?!
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."
Re:Does trolling happen on Macs too? (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.
Re:What's the difference? (Score:3, Funny)
Very little. Flamebait and Troll often cover a wide amount of the same style of ideas. I believe that if you eliminated one from the slashdot system, people would have no problem just using the other.
But, honestly, if you weren't such a newfag, you'd know these kinds of things. Sit around and lurk a little bit, and you won't be such an ignorant fuck.
Re:GNAA (Score:4, Funny)
Oh Fuck
GNAA Just got modded funny
World is burning
Four horsemen spotted
Film at Eleven.
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
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.
"Weev," dead at 24 (Score:3, Funny)
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - troll legend Weev was found dead in his Minnesota home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the 4chan community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to LiveJournal. Truly an American icon.
Re:First troll (Score:5, Funny)
"Superior to your box", English-language n00b.
-- Grammar, usage, and spelling Nazi, opportunistic division
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.
Re:Its not a 'game', neither it is a 'joke'. (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd (Score:3, Funny)
I was modded down half of the time because I was too exited to write clearly
You'll get there eventually... :)
Re:Troll Contest (Score:2, Funny)
Gotcha.
Re:New York Times (Score:2, Funny)
He's not your friend, guy!
Mod Points Used (Score:1, Funny)