Disarm Internet Trolls, Gently

Shlomi Fish writes "The best way to react to people trolling on Internet forums is not to feed them, right? Wrong! 'Don't feed the trolls' is also usually ineffective. Luckily, however, there is more effective approach, inspired by the book Feeling Good by David D. Burns."

Oh, the irony.

[Kaz Kylheku]

The linked-to article was written by one Schlomi Fish, who is a kind of programming language troll.

I wrote a very nice Lisp program once upon a time, and Fish wrote a critique one of whose main points is that I should have written it in a different programming language, quote:

If Meta-CVS' author wishes to make it more popular, I strongly advise him to re-implement it in C, Perl, Python or something more standard.

So we can take this new article to be a kind of insider's guide to trolling, I suppose. :)

What a fucking arrogant asshole, "strongly advising" his superior.

Define "troll"

[Charliemopps]

The fact that the person came into a Python IRC channel and started ripping on python, by definition would not be a troll. They are argumentative, irritating, and most probably drunk... but not a troll. A Troll is secretive, hiding under a bridge, then springs out on you. I'm not sure who decided that anyone they find irritating on the internet is a Troll, but it needs to stop. Trolling is an Art-form... a very irritating, often insulting, art-form. Someone that just yells "Your favorite band sucks!" is not a troll, they're just a jerk.