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.'"
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.
Top 2 articles on Google News for trolls are... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.
Once again the dead tree press screws ups a... (Score:2, Interesting)
respectable term. First hacker, now troll. A real troll is a work of art - designed to drive some unsuspecting fool to post a correction to some obviously wrong information, without stopping to think if the poster is serious. AFU was perhaps the premier site for trolling USENET; ROM was like shooting fish in a barrel since mensanites can't refrain from showing off their superior knowledge.
Paging Ted Frank...
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:New York Times (Score:3, Interesting)
The best troll in the world was Andy Kaufman (Score:2, Interesting)
and he set things up so that even when he died of lung cancer, people still thought that he faked his death and would come back 20 or 30 years later.
It was a great troll Andy, but you can only pull it off once. Getting your friends to play Tony Clifton after you died, was a good troll as well as all of those fake Andy Kaufman sightings and fake Andy Kaufman online profiles set up by your friends.
Getting someone like Jim Carrey to play you in the movie was genius as he is a great troll as well. They even played the "Man on the Moon" movie with an ending that Andy Kaufman was still alive.
Andy Kaufman knew that the media and news were corrupt and made up stories to manipulate people politically, so he fed them false information to keep them on their toes and troll them, so that when he finally died, nobody would believe that he was dying and after he died everyone would think he faked his death.
All other trolls who use flashy graphics on epilepsy forums, or goatse or tubgirl pron, or troll people who killed themselves aren't real trolls they are sociopaths. That stuff isn't funny, yo, that stuff is having fun at another person's expense and causing them to suffer more. It is not Dadaism, it is sadism.
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.
Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow, this one actually got modded Troll. You struck a nerve there.
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.
Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd (Score:3, Interesting)
Sadly you're pretty much correct. Slashdot's moderation system sounds like a good idea at first, and surely takes a lot off the work load of the /. staff (just what the hell do those guys do anyway?), but ultimately it's a system that reinforces the dominant opinions. Someone posts comment, is modded up, gets mod points, mods up similar opinions, etc.
Ideally people would be modded based on _how_ they say it, but too many times that just isn't the case.
IOW, you're karma whore (Score:2, Interesting)
Then I learned and built my karma up.
IOW, you're karma whore.
Re:But that's not the point (Score:4, Interesting)
[emphasis mine]
Drawing the line between trolling and harassment? (Score:2, Interesting)
I allow anonymous commenting on my blog, because I do believe that people should be able to express their opionions, even with anonymity to protect them from repercussions with unpopular opinions. That's not trolling; that's laying a foundation to allow meaningful discussions.
OTOH, I recently led a dicussion on a very controversial, and very hotly contested topic, and the result was that I had my home address posted on the 'net. I interpreted it as a threat, took it down, and am currently going through my IP logs to get an IP before contacting law enforcement. Think something along the lines of bombing abortion clinics.
(The "wah, I was sexually abused as a kid" line doesnt give you the right to be a douchebag to others, am I right?)
Clearly there is a line between asking uncomfortable questions and being annoying, and endangering others. These "trolls" don't draw the line. The behavior that the "trolls" exhibit in the NYT article often does pass the boundary between "trolling" (basically, being an irritating jackass) to harassment (calling the parents of a dead kid to make fun of him? That's pretty low.)
The people in these articles aren't "trolls". They're straight up harassers, and obviously they get OFF on that. The conclusion of the article tries to justify their actions at least somewhat with "I'm doing it to HELP others by pointing out their flaws" line of reasoning, but I don't find it very convincing, especially when they admit that they get their LULZ in "disrupting another's emotional equilibrium."
I'm glad that there are now criminal penalties for internet harassment and cyberstalking. Unfortunately, these guys not only get away with it, but take pride in it.
Yahoo had tons of trolls (Score:1, Interesting)