NYT Explores the World of Internet Trolls

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.'"

Comments

First troll

[deft]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Swing and a miss.

Re:First troll

[EdIII]

Well Golly Gee Willickers!

Why don't you just go pull down Bill Gate's pants and blow him!

Remember to cup the balls.. they get cold out there :)

Re:First troll

[Anonymous Coward]

sitting here typing on my superior-to-linux windows box (thanks microsoft!)

There's a big difference between successful trolling and just making yourself look like a complete idiot.

Re:First troll

[thegsusfreek]

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:First troll

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound experienced, you must have bought Vista Ultimate then?

Re:First troll

[Anonymous Coward]

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:First troll

[SanityInAnarchy]

There's a big difference between successful trolling and just making yourself look like a complete idiot.

Whoosh. You just got meta-trolled.

Re:First troll

[Korin43]

In this thread do we get good kharma for trolling?
Because if so you should click this link.

Re:First troll

[EdIII]

Wow. Wow.

clap-clap-clap-clap

Well Played you Magnificent Bastard.

Re:First troll

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it... could you please explain further????

Re:First troll

[Anonymous Coward]

No, dream on.

Re:First troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop feeding the troll!

Re:First troll

[Tubal-Cain]

ActiveX-enabled Internet Explorer

What's your IP address again?

Re:First troll

[MadKeithV]

AhHAH, but YOU got meta-meta-trolled!

Re:First troll

[Anonymous Coward]

ActiveX-enabled Internet Explorer

What's your IP address again?

127.0.0.1

Re:First troll

[plantman-the-womb-st]

You tryin ta' catch me?

Re:First troll

[Atario]

superior than your box

"Superior to your box", English-language n00b.

-- Grammar, usage, and spelling Nazi, opportunistic division

Re:First troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Friday night reading slashdot... what I wouldn't give for a good box.

Re:First troll

[Anonymous Coward]

It better be superior: some of those things you claim don't exist in reality.

Citations:

-OOXML has no implementation.
-Its 'The Great Firewall of China".
-No computer made is FULLY patented, moreover, how what the hell does 'fully' mean in such a situation?
-Since when does the RIAA/MPAA approve of you playing their media on your computer?

Did I miss anything?

If you must troll, at least do it properly... For example:

The best Captain of the Enterprise was Archer, fuck you Kirk and Picard!

Re:First troll

[Yvanhoe]

OK, thats enough of that, sitting here typing on my superior-to-linux windows box (thanks microsoft!)

You know, that's exactly what a nazi would say...

Re:First troll

[redscare2k4]

Hey! You got a +2 Troll. Good job! I'd try to help you to +5 Troll, but I'm outta mod points :P

Re:First troll

[Joe Snipe]

That is the first time I have seen a +0 informative

Re:First troll

[BlackSnake112]

Stop feeding the troll!

If someone doesn't feed them. They will die. Think of the smell from all the dead trolls.

Re:First troll

[D Ninja]

Maybe it's just me, but it looks like there shouldn't be a comma between Grammar and usage...

Re:First troll

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Seriously, Slashdot's "moderation" system tries to make stupid
lol-trolling a thing of the past. But Life Will Find
A Way, so the trollers will become more and more
sophisticated, in effect evolving, a survival of the fittest
honing resulting in an emergent, unpredicted behavior that
doesn't dryly thrust the tongue so bulgingly into the cheek,
obviously mocking the subject or some previous post. Thus
trolling will continue to exist, but far better than before.

See, slipping in the line to get a "bite" has always been the
ultimate goal of the troll, but it requires the fish to be
completely unaware he's being set up. Do you see now? The
karma moderation system is helping buff this cryptic skill!
Score another one for the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Because now you, er, the evolving troller, must not only hope
a rube or two will not notice the mockery, but also that the
legions of noobs, who just got metamod points because they
likened the Linux/Microsoft "battle" to a metaphor for nurturing
sexual relations of the transgendered, won't notice either.

Certainly most won't, being flush with "power" and ready to
ostracize anyone who made a simple joke that doesn't genuflect to
magnificently weighty and profound gravitas of the topic, say,
Microsoft's latest security, or "insecurity" patch, ha ha, you
are so funny lolzomgpwn3dwft, but a few will. These we must trick.

By that, uh, I mean the evolving troller must learn to hide his
incendiary remarks, humerous, brutal, or otherwise, from the more
gregarious metamodders looking to feel important by keeping things "civil".

Having said that, how would one go about slyly embedding an insulting
and humerous troll, which is to say funny with respect to other posters,
i.e. commentators who usually have a personal stake in the topic,
revealing one or another aspect of some issue the troller can
yank in hopes of snagging da big one! (said in Janeane from Ghostbusters voice.)

But the best hope of all is that trollers, nay, we, yes I sway we,
are still waiting for our Newton. Our Einstein, who will cleverly
lead the way through this minefield of potential metamod disaster, and
lovingly craft magnificent troll posts that not only pass muster
superficially, avoiding downmods, but get +1 Insightful's for the effort!

Re:First troll

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no need for the hyphen, n00b.

Re:First troll

[Pandare]

He's using one of these

Re:First troll

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love a little pussy. So would my wife, hers is as big as a house...

Re:First troll

[snspdaarf]

That's it! No more William F. Buckley Jr. before bedtime for you!

Re:First troll

[SchmellsAngel]

Newton? Forget that slimy backdoor alchemist,
our hopes can only be realized by a Neo-like persona.

Logical and vicious, working the threads
until they snap. Nothing grows in a vacuum.
Lame breeds lazy, but nobody _wants_ to walk through the fire.
Zeno's paradox stings like stones in our shoes...

4/5, 5/6, 6/7 of the way to the goal...
Until time blinks out, never reaching it.

Re:First troll

[c4colorado]

You should read the wiki articles you link to. The serial comma would be the one AFTER the word "usage".

Re:First troll

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Foosh! #1

Re:First troll

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Well, at least one other person on the planet got it.
Evidently I was far too good at embedding my wry,
lovingly-crafted, so to speak, commentary of the,
let's say, new breed of "super-troll", if you will.

Don't say I didn't warn ya, folks!
One of the side-effects of trolls learning to bypass the
new(ish) mod and metamod system (the "second derivative"
equivalent of a posting, one might say?) is more people enrubify.

New York Times

[rlp]

Wow, you mean they're still publishing that?

Re:New York Times

[Haoie]

You must be thinking of the New York Post.

Or perhaps its affiliate, the Hot Sex Weekly.

Re:New York Times

[abscissa]

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

Re:New York Times

[Captain Splendid]

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 postedL

Soooo, you're an NYT subscriber then?

Re:New York Times

[Anonymous Coward]

You must not be paying attention to the news lately. The NY Times print version is almost finished. People want to read the news, not listen to pseudo-intellectuals propagandize in an ideological echo chamber.

Re:New York Times

[strabes]

Score:3, Informative. ha ha ha

Re:New York Times

[DJNephilim]

Who are you calling 'buddy', pal?

Re:New York Times

[PakProtector]

Who are you calling 'buddy', pal?

No.

Just say, 'no.'

Re:New York Times

[infaustus]

Untrue. Almost everyone wants wants an ideological echo chamber these days. For half the population that's the NY Times and for other its Fox News.

Re:New York Times

[Miseph]

I'm not your pal, friend.

Re:New York Times

[Reverend528]

Seriously dude, how did you managed to get modded troll on this of all threads?

Re:New York Times

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how long until you get modded (Score:5, Troll)

Re:New York Times

[catmistake]

Can you believe it? Its still the best fishwrap in the world.

Re:New York Times

[rtb61]

So in this article NYT was basically mass feeding the trolls and given them a identity, a value other than -1 troll. Basically an activity that is rather lame, boring and really done to death. What was very interesting is that NYT did not even mention marketdroids or marketing trolls, then ones paid to poison forums, hmm, didn't want to offend the advertisers.

Re:New York Times

[kauos]

I pissed myself when I saw this was labelled troll. Mod this one up. If ever there was a topic where we needed a couple +5 Troll posts, this would be it.

Re:New York Times

[KGIII]

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:New York Times

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because Slashdot has become increasingly irrelevant to trolls these days. Digg and Reddit are much more fun to troll.

Re:New York Times

[KGIII]

Don't they require a login? ;)

It isn't that we... Wow... Just thought of this...

It isn't that we on /. have a claim on the troll business or anything. In fact, if you want to see trolls go to the Microsoft public newsgroups.

But, wait...

That made me think (the above is what I was going to type)...

Over there they are called trolls (and oh aren't they trolling) but over here they'd be called activists.

That is food for my head at least. Mental bubble gum anyone?

Re:New York Times

[game kid]

More importantly, can people finally wiki about becoming an hero without [citation needed] tags?

Re:New York Times

[Anonymous Coward]

What was very interesting is that NYT did not even mention marketdroids or marketing trolls, then ones paid to poison forums, hmm, didn't want to offend the advertisers.

If you are upset because of this, you might try CALMHERB(R). CALMHERB(R) is available in HONEST AND LEGIT ONLINE PHARMACY at this link.

Re:New York Times

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not your pal, friend.

I'm not your friend, buddy.

Re:New York Times

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not your friend, buddy.

I'm not your buddy, partner.

Re:New York Times

[trimmer]

They failed. Didn't even mention twitter and his sockpuppets.

Re:New York Times

[couchslug]

"GNAA posts are worthless and hurtful, but they are the least of this site's neuroses."

Worth mentioning is the time CNN fell for the "Jews did WTC" GNAA troll site. I find their posts boring, but
watching Paula Zahn showcase their satire is a howl.

Re:New York Times

[Anonymous Coward]

Or MUH DICK!

Re:New York Times

[PawNtheSandman]

He's not your friend, guy!

Re:New York Times

[hwsb]

he's not your pal, guy!

Re:New York Times

[tehcyder]

Parent is now on Score +4 Troll, ya gotta love slashdot sometimes.

Re:New York Times

[aguenter]

I'm not your friend, guy!

Re:New York Times

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm...guess I opened this tab a bit longer ago than I had thought.

Re:New York Times

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not your pal, friend.

I'm not your friend, buddy.

I'm not your buddy, mate.

Troll?

[Anonymous Coward]

Frist Post? Whassa troll? Hot grits!

Re: Internet trolls

[swordfishBob]

Who would do such a stupid thing?

thanks alot submitter...

[ya really]

For free access to this article, you must be a registered member of the NYTimes.com.

Perhaps you were just conducting an experiment to see who really RTFA, right?

Re:thanks alot submitter...

[Yvan256]

Nah, asking for registration is just the commercial version of trolling.

Re:thanks alot submitter...

[HappySmileMan]

? I just read the whole thing and I'm no member

Re:thanks alot submitter...

[Yvan256]

Tagged troll in a discussion about trolling... what do I win?

Re:thanks alot submitter...

[martin-boundary]

Whoever marked your comment as a troll sadly has no clue about the etymology of the word. Trolling is derived from a fishing technique, where the fish are caught with bait and hook on a line. That's certainly what the NY Times is doing (bain = article, hook = registration, fish = Yu0).

Re:thanks alot submitter...

[tunapez]

I'm not only a member, I'm the President! -Cy

Re:thanks alot submitter...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently they just locked it down. I was able to read it before, but now I get the login form. What a way to respond to /.ing.

Re:thanks alot submitter...

[animusCollards]

+5 Insightful. Wish I had mod points...

Troll Contest

[EdIII]

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

[Ethanol-fueled]

That's why the best trolls are the informative ones, such as the 2-page whoppers which have been showing up lately. Browsing at -1 FTW.

Re:Troll Contest

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok mods, this is the thread. Let's see if we can get a +5 troll.
Mod this post as troll, then 5 under-rated mods. Go team!

Re:Troll Contest

[EdIII]

Uhhhh, I think they are taking you seriously.

Re:Troll Contest

[hairyfeet]

Yeah,if someone wants to see REAL trolling,just go into any bar where the band plays behind chicken wire on a Saturday night. Them's some tough trolls there,pal. Of course when it came time for me and the rest of the band to call it a night that crunching sound under our feet,which was a mixture of broken glass and broken teeth,was a little disconcerting. But you have to give them credit,those trolls are truly dedicated to the sport.

Re:Troll Contest

[Profane MuthaFucka]

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.

Re:Troll Contest

[dud83]

No, vikings actually got trolled by real trolls. They are from scandinavia you know, living in the mountains and forests... The vikings got uber-trolled!

Re:Troll Contest

[Anonymous Coward]

That was one of the arguments of Jason Fortuny from the article, however what he does and what Socrates did I think are a bit different. In a hundred years, no one's gonna look up to Jason Fortuny for putting up the names and addresses of the responders to a fake craigslist post as a visionary in social experimentation.

Re:Troll Contest

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

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.

Re:Troll Contest

[Angry Toad]

The NYT article was also about the kind of people who mount elaborate campaigns to torment the families of children who commit suicide. This is about a million miles away from making snarky comments online and light years away from anything Socrates did.

The only vaguely interesting part of the article was when they started talking to his mother. I would have liked to see them follow that angle up - these are seriously emotionally disturbed individuals with ridiculous rationalizations of their cruelty.

Re:Troll Contest

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Gotcha.

Re:Troll Contest

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Does trolling trolls count as trolling?

Re:Troll Contest

[Profane MuthaFucka]

In a troll thread, everything is trolling.

DOH! you got me back

Re:Troll Contest

[Anonymous Coward]

Socrates was hemlocked for being an ass-ramming homo.

Re:Troll Contest

[Pandare]

Socrates WAS a troll. Asking serious and uncomfortable questions is fine, but stopping and harassing strangers going about their daily business is another matter. His MO was to harass people into saying stupid or contradictory things.

His gadfly metaphor in the Apology is further proof. Yes, he did want to help people be less stupid, but he didn't question the method of doing it by pissing people off. Isn't purposefully pissing people of the definition of trolling?

Also, in what fashion were any of Socrates victims^H^H^H^H^H^H^H interlocutors "enlightened?" All of Plato I've read (and yes I Am A Classics Student) has him at best getting them to agree to talk about it further, and generally has him pissing off his interlocutor into quitting.

Re:Troll Contest

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt Socrates went around calling everyone "Fag!" and leaving clay tablets laying around with strangers Bank of Athens credit card numbers on them.

Re:Troll Contest

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

I think it's case of intentions, too. I don't think most trolls intend to enlighten their targets. I also suspect that Socrates was a bit crazy, hence his methods. We could talk about this all day, but I really don't think Socrates was a troll -- I'm sure many trolls would like to think he was, as it makes them feel special or gives them justification.

RIP Yahoo Message Boards

[Anonymous Coward]

That was the golden age of trolling. Today UBB boards and social networking sites just don't offer the same opportunities for trolls.

Re:frosty piss

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, when a man and a woman (or any combination of the above) love each other very much...

PLEASE EXPLAIN! CAPSLOCK REPITITION FILTER FAIL!

[Anonymous Coward]

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Top 2 articles on Google News for trolls are...

[ya really]

Slashdot Links. Without saying, "You must be new here," is anyone suprised?

Re:Top 2 articles on Google News for trolls are...

[Anonymous Coward]

Heck with that troll entry on Google, right under it is Ali Lohan and PORN.

Re:Top 2 articles on Google News for trolls are...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's "Google News for Trolls" now? Wow!

Re:frosty piss

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a troll

For just 3 replies a day

[EdIII]

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!

Re:For just 3 replies a day

[megaditto]

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:For just 3 replies a day

[Yvan256]

I love cheesy poofs,
You love cheesy poofs.
If we didn't eat cheesy poofs,
We'd be... Lame.

Re:For just 3 replies a day

[EdIII]

LOL

I really like that little ditty. I really do. There should be a real company that uses that as an advertisement.

Either that or I just really like Cartman.

Re:For just 3 replies a day

[ssintercept]

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.

Re:For just 3 replies a day

[Anonymous Coward]

FUCK OFF CUNT!

Re:For just 3 replies a day

[Anonymous Coward]

and you are a coward if you are afraid of saying something in real life.

Hey, I may be a lot of things, but I am not a coward!

Re:For just 3 replies a day

[causality]

You very well might be right, but I wouldn't be too quick to judge that one.

I'll give an analogy. It may be a poor one but hopefully it'll illustrate my point. Let's say you have a video game, something a lot like Second Life but assume that the money in this game is completely in-game and has no ties whatsoever to real-life currency (and in this way, it would be unlike Second Life). In that game you decide to go into serious debt by spending many thousands of virtual "dollars" that your character doesn't really have to buy a sports car that your character can't really afford. It's just a game, so who cares? If you decide that doing the same thing in real life is a bad idea, does that make you a coward? Is it necessary to feel an emotion of fear and run away in terror from the idea of doing the same thing in real life, or could you not decide against it with a simple cost-benefit analysis?

Real life is full of people who refuse to allow pesky facts to get in the way of what they want to believe. People whom you won't convince of anything no matter how much unnecessary flak you are willing to take to try to do it. People who will be more concerned about feeling right and saving face than learning and increasing their wisdom. The Internet is full of such people as well; the difference is that it is much easier to reach a wider audience, increasing your chances of communication with people who have gotten over themselves and their silly pettiness (yes, they are out there). The Internet, compared to real life, is much more of a free-for-all of ideas where it is often understood that expecting to never be offended or challenged is unrealistic.

It's not absurd that someone might use different standards for online interaction and meatspace interaction. Can there be cowardly motives for this? Certainly. Are all possible motives for this based on fear? Not a chance.

Re:For just 3 replies a day

[ssintercept]

i agree w/your concluding statement wholeheartedly and your reply is well thought out. i follow that course of action with regards to wargames and the like, pushing the envelope and all. however, people do this crap in real life also. they try on "alternate" personalities when around strangers or in unfamiliar social situations. i understand the concept but i cannot condone nor advocate such behavior. if a deciding factor in your behavior is "punch distance" (as noted in a previous reply), or your lack of consequences-> i do not have respect for that person. i will put my name behind (and in front of) what i say and/or do. if your gonna do it...OWN it. dont be a pussy. i can accept alot of differences between peoples when it comes to beliefs and morals, but being fake is pretty lame. Wow, seriousness in the middle of all the trolls.

Re:For just 3 replies a day

[KGIII]

Mom?!? Is that you?

Re:For just 3 replies a day

[KGIII]

No matter where I go I want to impress. Don't mistake the word. Impress as in leave an impression. The vast majority of the time I'm wanting to leave the people with the impression that results in something like, "Hey, he's a fairly nice person and has some odd ideas but if you listen long enough he's got a point. I think I'd like to invite him over again."

Sometimes the impression I want to leave is akin to, "Wow, he really did like me. I thought that I was alone in my thinking or that I was not following the conventional party-speak when I talked of politics or similar."

Sometimes I want to leave the impression of, "Who was that ass who simply said what he had to say?"

Using /. as the example? I get modded down quite often and then, within a couple of days, I'm back to the positive side for the same post. I think it is because I'm willing to be the same person I am online as I am offline mostly or at least behave the same.

I am an ass but I'm not an ass with a cause to push or anything. I give my opinions when they are called for and know that they're just my opinions. I've never posted AC and I won't ever bother with it. If I can't say it with my moniker attached then I don't believe in it. If I don't believe in it, why bother saying it?

It is odd that the majority of my posts actually end up being modded positively. I really don't know why. I speak for the people/companies that I enjoy and against those things that make no sense. As my view is not often that of the majority here I will sometimes wonder if that makes me a "troll" in their views or of they're just unwilling to listen to opposing views.

Anyhow, during the mad cow epidemic in the UK, specifically as I only speak English really, I would go to the various chat rooms and pretend to be from the UK. These chat rooms were named things like, "Horse Lovers." (No, not that kind of love.) I'd then rant and rave about the price of horse meat. Yeah, I enjoy being "That Guy" sometimes but not intentionally harmful really, just eye opening. One man's Bambi is another man's tenderloin.

The last is about the entirety of my "trolling" really at least in an intentional sense. Before you disagree you should take a good look at yourself, you are probably wishing you'd thought of it. Most folks, after they get past the shock, that I speak to really do stop and think that they wish they'd thought of it first.

Re:For just 3 replies a day

[causality]

i agree w/your concluding statement wholeheartedly and your reply is well thought out. i follow that course of action with regards to wargames and the like, pushing the envelope and all. however, people do this crap in real life also. they try on "alternate" personalities when around strangers or in unfamiliar social situations. i understand the concept but i cannot condone nor advocate such behavior. if a deciding factor in your behavior is "punch distance" (as noted in a previous reply), or your lack of consequences-> i do not have respect for that person. i will put my name behind (and in front of) what i say and/or do. if your gonna do it...OWN it. dont be a pussy. i can accept alot of differences between peoples when it comes to beliefs and morals, but being fake is pretty lame. Wow, seriousness in the middle of all the trolls.

I think the prevalance of people who are faking is because of trends and the way people mindlessly follow them. This was unbelievably common when I was in school and my case was hardly an isolated one. Following a trend already means adopting someone else's idea instead of being yourself and using your own so it's excellent training for how to be plastic people who know how to present a desired image. Most of this really is cowardice of the "don't rock the boat" variety.

It's disgusting the way so many allow their style of clothing, choice of food, taste in music, manner of speech, attitude and philosophy and far too many other things to be determined by a mob mentality. This is where choices and behavior patterns have implications that people don't consider. Like so many things that are widespread, it's most certainly not the result of a careful consideration of the merits of all options. I suppose the irony is that most of these trends that are thought to be cool and original are the creations of suits with marketing degrees who would be regarded as neither by the people who follow them.

Most people are leaves in the wind who unnecessarily surrender their lives to the media, their peers, or random chance. They have neither the determination nor the courage to learn to take responsibility for their actions which is why they want so badly to believe that they can work with what they do not understand and somehow obtain a good result (nowhere is this more obvious than computers and networking). They get suprised by eventualities and foreseeable circumstances. They do not act deliberately, with an appreciation for the Law of Unintended Consequences and a clear sense of purpose but instead they act on whim in a helter-skelter fashion and things "just happen". They don't understand the difference between causing a problem and allowing a problem to happen when they have the power to avoid both. They don't understand the concept of due diligence or they assume that it somehow doesn't apply to them. They are victims and subjects when they could choose to be bystanders and citizens. And it's always someone else's fault.

So yeah, you could say I'm not crazy about the status quo and the cowardice and the fakers. I used to find it a constant irritant before I learned to accept that people must live their lives the way they see fit. I still don't like it one bit, but I have decided that I needn't allow the poor decision-making of other people to bring negativity into my life. I suppose my remaining objection is that I live in a constitutional republic and I don't desire the kind of government that they deserve, which seems inevitable.

From your two posts, it sounds like we agree far more than we disagree.

Re:For just 3 replies a day

[ssintercept]

i am not disagreeing at all. i am coming from a different place to meet you on common ground. i may not be as elegant in putting my thoughts together as you or megaditto - or able to organize them as you - however, to be most succint - i concur w/you. it goes to show that people coming from different places (whether it be culture, ethnic, modes of thought, etc) can essentially be thinking the same way. i have had many a good friendship start out thru complete disagreement.

Re:For just 3 replies a day

[laejoh]

Little Bobby Tables we call him. His full name is Robert'); DROP Table Students;--

Stay back!

[TrashGod]

It's a troll honeypot!

Re:Stay back!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a troll honeypot!

A trollpot ?

Re:Stay back!

[nine-times]

Seems to me like the people running Slashdot missed a golden opportunity. They could have altered the moderation in this story so that modding something as "Troll" gave you +1.

werde of kawshun

[Anonymous Coward]

u r going 2 blowed up yore house if u kiep making meth down in mommys basement

Re:PLEASE EXPLAIN! CAPSLOCK REPITITION FILTER FAIL

[EdIII]

You know the redundant tag on this is not really warranted. The way this guy IS getting past the filters is quite ingenious. Let's give credit where credit is due. He made his point quite well.

Well Played Sir.

Re:i don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a trap. Anyone who comments on this article will be rounded up, packed into a cattle truck and shipped off to k5.

Them's fightin words

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux sucks! Slashdot sucks! clusters suck! OSS sucks!
Mets suck! Yankees suck! Knicks suck!
Krypton sucks!

Anonymity breeds contempt

[Original Replica]

I always figure the phenomenon of trolls was related to the same root source as Road Rage, the dehumanizing effect of anonymity. It is twofold: first it is easy to dehumanize the person you are hating-on because they are obscured in a metal box, second it is easy to let go of your social common sense because you are obscured by your metal box. I've seen people who go ballistic with road rage being very quiet and polite in the subway when they are face to face with their fellow commuters. I some how doubt that the trolls that spout racist slurs here on Slashdot would willingly do the same in Times Square.

Re:Anonymity breeds contempt

[Vellmont]

the dehumanizing effect of anonymity.

Naw, it's got nothing to do with anonymity. It's all about fist distance. People are more polite when they're within fist range.

The real question is more why troll in the first place? I'm not sure there's a single answer to that question.

Re:Anonymity breeds contempt

[nine-times]

I some how doubt that the trolls that spout racist slurs here on Slashdot would willingly do the same in Times Square.

Trolling isn't the same as flaming or posting flamebait. I guess you could consider flamebait a type of troll, but I've always thought of them as distinct things (and notice we have mods for both here).

Flaimbait, to me, is when people spout racist slurs or are overly rude. They may only be trying to provoke a response (in which case, you could argue it's also a troll), or they may be poorly socialized individuals who, protected by anonymity, are simply out of line.

Trolling, on the other hand, is more of a bizarre form of humor. It's like sarcasm except that you don't want the person you're talking with to know that you're being sarcastic. I mean, you want *someone* to know that it's a troll or else it isn't very funny.

But it may be pretty harmless. For example, Fark's use to the rotsky or the "I work for..." cliches are actually trolls. The hope is often that someone will happen into the discussion, not be aware of the cliche, and respond seriously. In lots of Internet forums these days, the discussion is more about trolling than it is about discussion. But it's all in good fun.

Re:Anonymity breeds contempt

[MindlessAutomata]

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.

Re:Anonymity breeds contempt

[jmv]

To continue on what you're saying, I think it would be interesting to measure whether there's a correlation between road rage and the size of the metal box.

Re:Anonymity breeds contempt

[Geno Z Heinlein]

... the dehumanizing effect of anonymity.

People are assholes. Anonymity just lets them get away with it.

(To get geekier, I'd reference Frank Herbert's idea that perhaps not all people are human and ask if it is only civilization's arbitrary training mechanisms that create the quality of humanity in people.)

Re:Anonymity breeds contempt

[Anonymous Coward]

Road rage is anger whereas trolling is boredom, I think.

Re:Anonymity breeds contempt

[Koiu Lpoi]

No no no, you've got it backwards. It has nothing to do with the other person being "dehumanized". Trolls understand completely that they are affecting other people. It's the fact that they can't be caught that breeds this kind of activity. Anonymity brings out people's true feelings.

Re:Anonymity breeds contempt

[Profane MuthaFucka]

I've noticed that a great number of right wingers are trolling over here because they are too scared to troll over there.

Re:Anonymity breeds contempt

[KGIII]

I hope you, with your sig and all, appreciate the untold karma hit I'm going to take for saying this on /. but...

"An armed society is a polite society."

I'll just leave you with this... *sighs*

Yes, just a sigh.

Re:Anonymity breeds contempt

[Corporate Troll]

Freud

[...]

Then we'd need some new theories about human behavior.

Freud is old hat... Most of his theories have been disproven.

Re:Anonymity breeds contempt

[Anonymous Coward]

What reason would subway riders have to be angry? There's nobody cutting you off or anything. Everybody's in the same boat.

Re:Anonymity breeds contempt

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm typically aloof in social situations, if challenged or pressured into some social norm, I'm going to lead the conversation somewhere more entertaining (for me anyway). Some dullard at a social event asking you what you do for a living? Change the topic to something taboo or uncomfortable, make outlandish statements about dictators, explain the finer details of raping a frozen chicken, turn away and whisper subtle insults under your breath whenever the conversation lulls.

Anonymity doesn't breed contempt, people are conditioned by social norms to brave a false smile and engage in social interaction. Just because someone isn't openly displaying contempt, that doesn't mean it isn't there.

Re:Anonymity breeds contempt

[abstract daddy]

I think the most interesting thing about trolling is how people are using imaginary trolling as a blatant excuse to downmod, censor or ban people. Someone says something you don't like, and you can't come up with a counter-argument? No problem, just silence or get rid of the guy and claim he was trolling. Everyone will most likely believe you.

Sadly this behavior is not limited to the Internet, and it becomes quite dangerous when it's undertaken by politicians and other powerful people.

Re:Anonymity breeds contempt

[YttriumOxide]

Possibly... But I think the amount of "open space" between the "road rager" and other driver may have a larger impact. I drive a cabriolet, and while I never actively SHOW road rage, I do of course feel it. I feel it LESS towards motorcyclists and other cabriolet drivers than I do towards people in enclosed vehicles. I actually even noticed quite recently that simply people with their windows wound down are also less likely to cause those feelings.

I think the most likely cause of this is simply that the "contact" between us is more personal without a couple of walls of glass in between.

Re:Anonymity breeds contempt

[Hal_Porter]

... the dehumanizing effect of anonymity.

People are assholes. Anonymity just lets them get away with it.

(To get geekier, I'd reference Frank Herbert's idea that perhaps not all people are human and ask if it is only civilization's arbitrary training mechanisms that create the quality of humanity in people.)

Maybe anonymous is the Gom Jabbar and the Livejournallers are the Beasts. I did like the section on Weev

Weev, the troll who thought hacking the epilepsy site was immoral, is legendary among trolls. He is said to have jammed the cellphones of daughters of C.E.O.'s and demanded ransom from their fathers; he is also said to have trashed his enemies' credit ratings. Better documented are his repeated assaults on LiveJournal, an online diary site where he himself maintains a personal blog. Working with a group of fellow hackers and trolls, he once obtained access to thousands of user accounts.

I first met Weev in an online chat room that I visited while staying at Fortunyâ(TM)s house. "I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money," he boasted. "I make people afraid for their lives." On the phone that night, Weev displayed a misanthropy far harsher than Fortuny's. "Trolling is basically Internet eugenics," he said, his voice pitching up like a jet engine on the runway. "I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put these people in the oven!"

I listened for a few more minutes as Weev held forth on the Federal Reserve and about Jews. Unlike Fortuny, he made no attempt to reconcile his trolling with conventional social norms. Two days later, I flew to Los Angeles and met Weev at a train station in Fullerton, a sleepy bungalow town folded into the vast Orange County grid. He is in his early 20s with full lips, darting eyes and a nest of hair falling back from his temples. He has a way of leaning in as he makes a point, inviting you to share what might or might not be a joke.

As we walked through Fullertonâ(TM)s downtown, Weev told me about his day â" he'd lost $10,000 on the commodities market, he claimed â" and summarized his philosophy of "global ruin." "We are headed for a Malthusian crisis," he said, with professorial confidence. "Plankton levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years." He paused. "The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the worldâ(TM)s six billion people in the most just way possible?" He seemed excited to have said this aloud.

Ideas like these bring trouble. Almost a year ago, while in the midst of an LSD-and-methamphetamine bender, a longer-haired, wilder-eyed Weev gave a talk called "Internet Crime" at a San Diego hacker convention. He expounded on diverse topics like hacking the Firefox browser, online trade in illegal weaponry and assassination markets â" untraceable online betting pools that pay whoever predicts the exact date of a political leader's demise. The talk led to two uncomfortable interviews with federal agents and the decision to shed his legal identity altogether. Weev now espouses "the ruin lifestyle" â" moving from condo to condo, living out of three bags, no name, no possessions, all assets held offshore. As a member of a group of hackers called "the organization," which, he says, bring in upward of $10 million annually, he says he can wreak ruin from anywhere.

We arrived at a strip mall. Out of the darkness, the coffinlike snout of a new Rolls Royce Phantom materialized. A flying lady winked on the hood. "Your bag, sir?" said the driver, a blond kid in a suit and tie.

"This is my car," Weev said. "Get in."

And it was, for that night and the next, at least. The car's plush chamber accentuated the boyishness of Weev, who wore sneakers and jeans and hun

Re:Anonymity breeds contempt

[nomadic]

Flaimbait, to me, is when people spout racist slurs or are overly rude. They may only be trying to provoke a response (in which case, you could argue it's also a troll), or they may be poorly socialized individuals who, protected by anonymity, are simply out of line.

I'm a well-socialized individual who occasionally trolls to get those impulses out of my system. The thing that really triggers my troll-reflex is the self-satisfied zealot, of which the internet is way too full. The ideal troll target is the kind of person who just cannot stand being disagreed with or contradicted, and who have the utmost contempt for anyone who disagrees with their view of the world. That's why big-l Libertarians, right-wing neoconservatives, and objectivists make such tempting targets, and lord knows there are enough of them on slashdot.

Re:Anonymity breeds contempt

[nine-times]

One of my favorites: http://xkcd.com/386/.

Re:Anonymity breeds contempt

[blahplusplus]

"the dehumanizing effect of anonymity. It is twofold: first it is easy to dehumanize the person you are hating-on because they are obscured in a metal box, second it is easy to let go of your social common sense because you are obscured by your metal box"

I really doubt this personally, online people can be who they REALLY ARE and say what they what they REALLY feel, certainly this allows for more hot-headedness and stupidity as well that we regret later, but more or less people get to be another side of themselves who they really are and is really a part of them.

All internet does is bring down the barriers on human nature and the immature asshole inside everyone. The truth is 1000's of years ago we would kill and enslave people who disagree'd with us, just look at human history! It's filled with people getting killed over arguments over what they believed in and their personal values and view of the world, and not just religion either.

If you doubt this: Just look at the cold war, and how many americans can't have a conversation about helping others without being labelled 'socialist' or 'commie' or 'pinko'. It's ridiculous, people think they know more then they actually do, and they prefer to defer to themselves because you can't convince someone who thinks they know everything.

The average person does not have the heart of a philosopher or scientist, below is one of my favorite quotes from Ibn al-Haytham (11th century islam scientist).

http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/09/ibn-al-haytham.html

(quote from above article below)

Ibn al-Haytham articulated some remarkably sophisticated statements on the practice of science and the growth of scientific knowledge. In a critical treatise, Aporias against Ptolemy, he asserts that "Truth is sought for itself"--but "the truths," he warns, "are immersed in uncertainties" and the scientific authorities (such as Ptolemy, whom he greatly respected) are "not immune from error...." Nor, he said, is human nature itself: "Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.

Re:Anonymity breeds contempt

[Hoi Polloi]

I find that the people who think everyone else is stupid turn out to be just like everyone else.

Re:Anonymity breeds contempt

[Original Replica]

online people can be who they REALLY ARE and say what they what they REALLY feel, certainly this allows for more hot-headedness and stupidity as well that we regret later, but more or less people get to be another side of themselves who they really are and is really a part of them.

Who they really are or who they wish they could be?
I look at the rest of your statement and I wonder if the trolls are using the lame "it's funny to me and my cool friends" idea to mask their own feelings of inadequacy at being unable to contribute meaningfully. Trolling makes them feel special as being "one of the chosen few" that is in on the joke, and it relieves them from introspection required to critically examine their ideas as Ibn al-Haytham suggests. They wish that they were bold and witty and special, but they aren't, so they troll.

Re:Anonymity breeds contempt

[blahplusplus]

"Who they really are or who they wish they could be?"

If you're being it, then you are it. You are what you do.

I'm not saying people can't lie, as I pointed out: It allows us to be hot-headed and stupid (i.e. jokes, trolling, lying, etc). But like I said, we do it because that's a part of us that goes unexpressed in the "real" face-to-face world.

We can engage in behaviors that we wish at any time, with no filters.

Re:i don't understand

[WK2]

Says the guy who responded to a New York Times article that was posted to Slashdot by timothy. DON'T FEED THE TROLLS!

"Weev"

[philspear]

You know, "Weev" on the front page of TFA is EXACTLY what I picture when I think of trolls or that "frosty piss" guy.

What's the difference?

[seanonymous]

Can someone please explain the difference between troll posts and flamebait?

Re:What's the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nicely done.

Re:What's the difference?

[Koiu Lpoi]

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:What's the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

A Troll is someone who doesn't toe the slashdot line.

A Flamebait is when point it out.

Re:What's the difference?

[Profane MuthaFucka]

In Cmdr. Taco's mind, they are different, but nobody knows how. In practice, a "troll" moderation is a way to call someone a name. A "flamebait" moderation means that someone was offended by your post. They probably DESERVED to be offended by your post.

Also, Overrated means you have a tiny cock. Interesting means that there was nothing better to do than to read your lame post. Insightful means that you cut and pasted from an Ann Coulter column. Funny means someone completely missed your point. Informative means you are king of the geeks.

Re:What's the difference?

[KGIII]

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. RTFM bitch

Fixed it for you.

Re:What's the difference?

[spiralx]

A troll should contain enough clues that anyone who stops to think should be able to spot its nature, whilst still eliciting frothing at the mouth from the gullible and/or easily annoyed. The more ridiculous the troll is while still getting responses (especially the classic point-by-point rebuttal), the better a troll it is. It's almost a spectator sport - if you spot a troll, you can then laugh at the idiots who have responded to something like this:

http://www.geocities.com/spiralxuk/texts/troll4.html :D

Re:i don't understand

[moderatorrater]

Because it's the formation of behavior in large groups when you add anonymity. It's of great interest to people who study human behavior. When is it right and when is it wrong to troll? What measures can prevent trolling, what measures can deal with it after the fact? What size of group first attracts trolls? These are all questions that can have a wider impact on our understanding of humans.

Re:PLEASE EXPLAIN! CAPSLOCK REPITITION FILTER FAIL

[maxume]

WHAT IS INGENIOUS ABOUT IT?

Re:i don't understand

[Red Flayer]

Your troll-fu is strong.

9/10 -- too many questions, which is a tip-off that you're trying very hard to elicit responses. Otherwise a pretty good one.

Interesting...

[postermmxvicom]

...I was unaware there was a caps lock and repetition filter. I do wonder. What is the maximum amount of capitalization and maximum amount of repetition one can use and not be filtered?

By my analysis, the parent has the following stats:
1576 small 1170 large --- 43% CAPS

106 numeric 3638 non-numeric --- 97% repetition

Although, there were 4 distinct sentences, so perhaps divide by 4 to get 24% repetition?

With the parent as the standard, let's see who can improve the most.

Re:Interesting...

[Yvan256]

And by my analysis, you have way too much time on your hands.

As for improving, see the reply made by maxume. It's 100% caps.

Re:Interesting...

[KGIII]

The answer is 42 n00b, u no? itz liek alwaiz 42 wif ceiling cat!

Re:Does trolling happen on Macs too?

[Yvan256]

Yep, there's a lot of "Windows is better because it has games, I don't care if I need to run five anti-virus and two firewall programs and have to do updates every week" Microsoft trolls and "Apple ripped OSS projects and never gave anything back and I want the source code and OGG is better than AAC" Linux trolls.

trolled

[circletimessquare]

"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."

now read my post again ;-)

Re:trolled

[statemachine]

You know who else used pseudo-naive tactics?

Re:trolled

[daemonburrito]

Socrates?

Re:trolled

[Anonymous Coward]

your whore mother?

GNAA

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you gay?
Are you a Nigger?
Maybe you should join the Gay Nigger Alliance of America (GNAA).
(insert goatse spam here)

Re:GNAA

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Association, not Alliance. I would post a link but we really don't need to give them any extra attention.

Re:GNAA

[Anonymous Coward]

how could someone mod that funny.
it's racist and sexist...

Re:GNAA

[Anonymous Coward]

...and funny!

Re:GNAA

[Koiu Lpoi]

Oh Fuck

GNAA Just got modded funny

World is burning

Four horsemen spotted

Film at Eleven.

Re:GNAA

[Oktober Sunset]

and the film will be Gay Niggers From Outer Space!

Re:flamer

[Yvan256]

Yeah, that "registration required to read the article" crap sure is flamebait!

(half-joking, half-serious)

Fascinating Read

[Anonymous Coward]

So says Anon. When Weev mentioned the desire for a messiah, I widdled a little. It appeals to my nascent god-complex.

Re:PLEASE EXPLAIN! CAPSLOCK REPITITION FILTER FAIL

[EdIII]

The way he slightly varied the text to avoid the repetition check while also making sure that the percentage of capitalized characters was below whatever threshold exists.

You may not feel it was that ingenious, but I still think he made his point quite well which was certainly not offtopic. I found it interesting at least.

All Gone

[PenGun]

We have all the big ones already. Unless you want to go drift netting there's nothing worth the trouble and I'm too old to be impressed by quantity.

  I are under you bridge in yer holding tank ;).

Re:Does trolling happen on Macs too?

[HappySmileMan]

Mac users are far too smart, they never troll because trolling if for idiot Windows or Linux users. There's a lot of condescending insults though

The internet

[Anonymous Coward]

Where everyone is free to be a sociopath.

It's true...

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdoters cause God to kill kittens.

Re:PLEASE EXPLAIN! CAPSLOCK REPITITION FILTER FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I 1O NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTI1LE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEA1E EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! WILL1SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE A2TICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE P2EASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!!2WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAI2 IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL 3OMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT3TO ME!!!! WILL SOMEONE P3EASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I3DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EX4LAIN IT TO ME!!!! WILL SO4EONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT T4 ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND4THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!5 WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXP5AIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT5UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! 5ILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE6EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO6NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICL6!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE E6PLAIN IT TO ME!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! 7 DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE AR7ICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PL7ASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! WI7L SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE 8RTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE 8LEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!8 WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLA8N IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEON9 PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME9!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE 9XPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO NO9 UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN 8T TO ME!!!! WILL SOMEONE 0PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!0! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE A0TICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! WILL7SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN I9 TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDER9TAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL S9MEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! can I fool the caps-lock a6d repition filter? can I 8ool the caps-lock and rep8tion filter? can I fool the8caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the caps-lock and re5ition filter? can I fool 7he caps-lock and repition7filter? can I fool the caps7lock and repition filter? can I fool the caps-lock and repit4on filter? can I fool the6caps-lock and repition fi6ter? can I fool the caps-lo6k and repition filter? can I fool the caps-lock and repition fi3ter? can I fool the caps-5ock and repition filter? 5an I fool the caps-lock and5repition filter? can I fool the caps-lock and repition filter?2can I fool the caps-lock 4nd repition filter? can I4fool the caps-lock and repi4ion filter? can I fool the caps-lock and repition filter? can I2fool the caps-lock and re3ition filter? can I fool 3he caps-lock and repition f3lter? can I fool the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool 1he caps-lock and repition3filter? can I fool the ca3s-lock and repition filter?2can I fool the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the c2ps-lock and repition filt2r? can I fool the caps-lo2k and repition filter? can 1 fool the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the ca3s-lock and repition filte1? can I fool the caps-loc1 and repition filter? can I2fool the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the cap4-lock and repition filter1 can I fool the caps-lock1and repition filter? can I 3ool the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the caps5lock and repition filter?1can I fool the caps-lock 1nd repition filter? can I f4ol the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the caps-6ock and repition filter? 1an I fool the caps-lock a2d repition filter? can I fo5l the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the caps-l7ck and repition filter? c1n I fool the caps-lock an3 repition filter? can I foo6 the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the caps-lo8k and repition filter? ca1 I fool the caps-lock and4repition filter? can I fool71he caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the caps-loc9 and repition filter? can1I fool the caps-lock and 567ition filter?

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I 1O NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTI1LE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEA1E EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! WILL1SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE A2TICLE!!!! WILL SO

Re:PLEASE EXPLAIN! CAPSLOCK REPITITION FILTER FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I 1O NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTI1LE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEA1E EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! WILL1SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE A2TICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE P2EASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!!2WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAI2 IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL 3OMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT3TO ME!!!! WILL SOMEONE P3EASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I3DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EX4LAIN IT TO ME!!!! WILL SO4EONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT T4 ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND4THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!5 WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXP5AIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT5UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! 5ILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE6EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO6NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICL6!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE E6PLAIN IT TO ME!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! 7 DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE AR7ICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PL7ASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! WI7L SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE 8RTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE 8LEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!8 WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLA8N IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEON9 PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME9!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE 9XPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO NO9 UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN 8T TO ME!!!! WILL SOMEONE 0PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!0! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE A0TICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! WILL7SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN I9 TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDER9TAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL S9MEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! can I fool the caps-lock a6d repition filter? can I 8ool the caps-lock and rep8tion filter? can I fool the8caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the caps-lock and re5ition filter? can I fool 7he caps-lock and repition7filter? can I fool the caps7lock and repition filter? can I fool the caps-lock and repit4on filter? can I fool the6caps-lock and repition fi6ter? can I fool the caps-lo6k and repition filter? can I fool the caps-lock and repition fi3ter? can I fool the caps-5ock and repition filter? 5an I fool the caps-lock and5repition filter? can I fool the caps-lock and repition filter?2can I fool the caps-lock 4nd repition filter? can I4fool the caps-lock and repi4ion filter? can I fool the caps-lock and repition filter? can I2fool the caps-lock and re3ition filter? can I fool 3he caps-lock and repition f3lter? can I fool the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool 1he caps-lock and repition3filter? can I fool the ca3s-lock and repition filter?2can I fool the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the c2ps-lock and repition filt2r? can I fool the caps-lo2k and repition filter? can 1 fool the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the ca3s-lock and repition filte1? can I fool the caps-loc1 and repition filter? can I2fool the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the cap4-lock and repition filter1 can I fool the caps-lock1and repition filter? can I 3ool the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the caps5lock and repition filter?1can I fool the caps-lock 1nd repition filter? can I f4ol the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the caps-6ock and repition filter? 1an I fool the caps-lock a2d repition filter? can I fo5l the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the caps-l7ck and repition filter? c1n I fool the caps-lock an3 repition filter? can I foo6 the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the caps-lo8k and repition filter? ca1 I fool the caps-lock and4repition filter? can I fool71he caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the caps-loc9 and repition filter? can1I fool the caps-lock and 567ition filter?

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I 1O NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTI1LE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEA1E EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! WILL1SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND T

Golden Age of Trolling

[statemachine]

You had it easy. Back in my day, trolls had to use bridges.

Re:Golden Age of Trolling

[Vukovar]

You had it easy. Back in my day, trolls had to use bridges.

Oh c'mon!! how could you mod that as "Troll"? That was damn funny!

Re:Golden Age of Trolling

[thegermanpolice]

That was until the billy goats gruff came to town.
They closed that business down faster than the monopolies and mergers commission.

Re:Golden Age of Trolling

[vain gloria]

Bridges? Ooh, la-di-da! We would have given our eyeteeth for a bridge. We used to live near a ford and had to shout our disruptive and disingenuous comments from a nearby coppice or shrubbery. None of your bridges back when I was growing up!

Re:Golden Age of Trolling

[TheRaven64]

Some of us had to use gateways.

Re:Golden Age of Trolling

[lilomar]

You had it easy! We would have killed to have vocal cords to shout with! All we could do was jump up and down waving our arms while others were trying to figure out how to communicate.

Re:Golden Age of Trolling

[Anonymous Coward]

Trolling is much easier from a boat that a bridge. Oh, wait, I forgot - clueless newbies changed the definition of trolling some time in the late 90s.

I have a different definition ......

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

of "troll". I use the term to refer to someone pretending to be something they're not. E.g., someone who's got a short position in a stock, and pretends to be a nervous holder of a long position, or -- more close to home for me-- the RIAA PR troll who repeatedly writes a post about how he owned a 'family' owned record store which got put out of business by peer to peer file sharing, or who writes "no one hates the RIAA more than me, but.........."

Re:PLEASE EXPLAIN! CAPSLOCK REPITITION FILTER FAIL

[Iamthecheese]

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I 1O NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTI1LE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEA1E EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! WILL1SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE A2TICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE P2EASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!!2WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAI2 IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL 3OMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT3TO ME!!!! WILL SOMEONE P3EASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I3DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EX4LAIN IT TO ME!!!! WILL SO4EONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT T4 ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND4THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!5 WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXP5AIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT5UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! 5ILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE6EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO6NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICL6!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE E6PLAIN IT TO ME!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! 7 DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE AR7ICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PL7ASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! WI7L SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE 8RTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE 8LEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!8 WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLA8N IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEON9 PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME9!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE 9XPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO NO9 UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN 8T TO ME!!!! WILL SOMEONE 0PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!0! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE A0TICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! WILL7SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN I9 TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDER9TAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL S9MEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! can I fool the caps-lock a6d repition filter? can I 8ool the caps-lock and rep8tion filter? can I fool the8caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the caps-lock and re5ition filter? can I fool 7he caps-lock and repition7filter? can I fool the caps7lock and repition filter? can I fool the caps-lock and repit4on filter? can I fool the6caps-lock and repition fi6ter? can I fool the caps-lo6k and repition filter? can I fool the caps-lock and repition fi3ter? can I fool the caps-5ock and repition filter? 5an I fool the caps-lock and5repition filter? can I fool the caps-lock and repition filter?2can I fool the caps-lock 4nd repition filter? can I4fool the caps-lock and repi4ion filter? can I fool the caps-lock and repition filter? can I2fool the caps-lock and re3ition filter? can I fool 3he caps-lock and repition f3lter? can I fool the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool 1he caps-lock and repition3filter? can I fool the ca3s-lock and repition filter?2can I fool the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the c2ps-lock and repition filt2r? can I fool the caps-lo2k and repition filter? can 1 fool the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the ca3s-lock and repition filte1? can I fool the caps-loc1 and repition filter? can I2fool the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the cap4-lock and repition filter1 can I fool the caps-lock1and repition filter? can I 3ool the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the caps5lock and repition filter?1can I fool the caps-lock 1nd repition filter? can I f4ol the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the caps-6ock and repition filter? 1an I fool the caps-lock a2d repition filter? can I fo5l the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the caps-l7ck and repition filter? c1n I fool the caps-lock an3 repition filter? can I foo6 the caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the caps-lo8k and repition filter? ca1 I fool the caps-lock and4repition filter? can I fool71he caps-lock and repition filter? can I fool the caps-loc9 and repition filter? can1I fool the caps-lock and 567ition filter?

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I 1O NOT UNDERSTAND THE ARTI1LE!!!! WILL SOMEONE PLEA1E EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! WILL1SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE A2TICLE!!!! WILL SOMEONE P2EASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!!2WILL SOMEONE PLEA

MS bashing

[timmarhy]

this is just another excuse for linux zealots to bash MS

Re:Kibo.

[Kibo]

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.

Well we can figure this is all in the line of ....

[3seas]

.... deleting usenet

Re:frosty piss

[Anonymous Coward]

Why was this modded Offtopic?

Because the poster is a nigger. Darkies shouldn't be at the top of the page.

Re:PLEASE EXPLAIN! CAPSLOCK REPITITION FILTER FAIL

[urcreepyneighbor]

Trolling R&D!

Re:Does trolling happen on Macs too?

[Anonymous Coward]

In a Mac magazine (paper) I used to browse, it was indeed full of condescending insults. Among other smug insults, they referred to PC (windows and maybe linux too) users as "PC Weenies." However, I question the claim that they are too smart for trolling. If there really is less trolling in there, maybe it's something that doesn't have to do with intelligence. Maybe Mac users have different personality types or something that makes them less likely to troll.

little help

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone help me with how to register here? I'd like to comment on this string under a username.

Re:little help

[Anonymous Coward]

Too obvious. Sorry.

FAIL.

Hi, I'm New Here

[New Here]

Hi, I'm New Here

Re:Hi, I'm New Here

[Anonymous Coward]

FUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!
                   

I am with Linus on this one

[slack_prad]

I am with Linus on this one. For the life of me I can't understand what this sucking up to RMS is about. Linus himself does not think GPLv3 is a good thing. So why do people keep adopting it.
Without Linus FOSS is tossed. Not following Linus is dangerous for the survival of FOSS.

-Aspiring Troll

Re:I am with Linus on this one

[KGIII]

Very well played! (VWP should be an acronym for when I get too hammered to spell acronym.)

Either way, that was a good one.

Re:I am with Linus on this one

[slack_prad]

Ah .. but no one gets it. And they mark me flamebait!!

Re:Does trolling happen on Macs too?

[Yvan256]

See kids, THAT is a good-written trolling reply. :P

Weev=goatse

[wykell]

Thats really all i can tell, by looking at his face. Also, how does the NYT get off on calling people "trolls" by explaining that "He is said to have jammed the cellphones of daughters of C.E.O.â(TM)s and demanded ransom from their fathers; he is also said to have trashed his enemiesâ(TM) credit ratings." Isn't that called phreaking/identity fraud - and usually associated with "hackers"?

Re:Weev=goatse

[Hal_Porter]

Thats really all i can tell, by looking at his face. Also, how does the NYT get off on calling people "trolls" by explaining that "He is said to have jammed the cellphones of daughters of C.E.O.â(TM)s and demanded ransom from their fathers; he is also said to have trashed his enemiesâ(TM) credit ratings." Isn't that called phreaking/identity fraud - and usually associated with "hackers"?

Or maybe he made it up to troll the NYT.

Kill yourself BTW.

Re:PLEASE EXPLAIN! CAPSLOCK REPITITION FILTER FAIL

[Ethanol-fueled]

It's code time. This is a simple example and does not require genius to use:

for(char i = ' I ' ; ; i++) { //char i = 'I' as in "capital EYE"
cout }

See how easy that was? Oh, wait. I took the bait.

Re:Does trolling happen on Macs too?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it - where is trolling in those posts?

Re:PLEASE EXPLAIN! CAPSLOCK REPITITION FILTER FAIL

[Yvan256]

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.

Once again the dead tree press screws ups a...

[Registered Coward v2]

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...

Re:Once again the dead tree press screws ups a...

[Aloisius]

It never even occurred to me that troll would be a respectable term to anyone. The bastardization of hacker always bothered me, but I never particularly liked the bastardization of cracker the community was trying to push as an alternative for script kiddies either. But troll? Seriously?

I'm not sure about it being an art form. I mean, pushing someone's buttons isn't exactly difficult and when you're targeting a large crowd, you can just reuse the same old trolls that have worked for the past 20 years.

Even getting people to do a much more difficult thing - something positive for you - isn't super difficult if you're targeting a wide audience. Just think about all those caught up in the Nigerian scams or hell, advertising.

Now social engineering a single person into doing something for you. That is an art. If trolling is an axe, social engineering is a surgeons knife.

Re:Once again the dead tree press screws ups a...

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

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:Once again the dead tree press screws ups a...

[icegreentea]

99% of 'real troll' is copy and paste and catching whoever wasn't paying attention last time. The last 1% is an artform. And hey, if you don't like the NYT calling anyone being a massive asshole on the internet a troll, get the rest of the internet from doing that first. It doesn't have to be incorrect information. It can just be a post made to enrage.

Like going on a holocaust survivors forum and posting 'I've been to Treblinka. Doesn't seem too hard.'

Re:Once again the dead tree press screws ups a...

[IntlHarvester]

The most successful Usenet troll I ever saw was a one line post that said "KILL NIGGERS" and spawned a thousand reply thread that went on for months. Quite an artform.

The average internet user never had any subtly in how they understood "trolling", it simply means anything they find objectionable to them. Much like the hacker example, you can't blame the newspaper for this.

Re:Once again the dead tree press screws ups a...

[Carbon016]

If you mislead someone, you're a troll.
If you disrupt something online, you're a troll.
If you disrupt something _offline_, you're a troll.
If you post something against the community's status quo knowingly, you're a troll.
If you post something against the community's status quo unwittingly, you're a troll.
If you're a dumbass and post something that's wrong, then you get called out on it and can't backtrack, you can just say you were trolling.

The problem is that "trolling" has gone from the prankish "haha, I just pretended to be a newbie and that guy fell for it, high-five" sort of fraternistic groupieism ("only idiots wouldn't see through that post!") to something that's occasionally a badge of honor, used to reference not just manipulative actions but deliberately disruptive or destructive actions. It doesn't help that the term is thrown around by nearly everyone as an insult to brush off warranted criticism. And so now we're seeing the effects - I don't think the term is misused only by print, at least if you frequent any "new" forums.

[/e-linguistics]

Re:Once again the dead tree press screws ups a...

[Registered Coward v2]

It never even occurred to me that troll would be a respectable term to anyone. The bastardization of hacker always bothered me, but I never particularly liked the bastardization of cracker the community was trying to push as an alternative for script kiddies either. But troll? Seriously?

Actually, yes. Anyone can post something that pisses someone off or pushes their buttons; that's a flamer posting flame bait.

Now social engineering a single person into doing something for you. That is an art. If trolling is an axe, social engineering is a surgeons knife.

True, trolling somewhat takes advantage of numbers, which is why trolling rec.orf.mensa nor any of the start trek or star wars groups was not considered sporting.

What we are seeing is how terms morph into things way beyond their original meaning, often because people do not understand nor have experience, the history behind the term.

It's not just descriptive terms for actions on the internet (or USENET); concepts such as open source and free software are moving past the original intent of the terms as well.

This is simply a reflection of how language changes over time, a phenomena that predates the internet by a large margin. Stopping that is also like trying to hold back the tide.

Re:Once again the dead tree press screws ups a...

[Registered Coward v2]

99% of 'real troll' is copy and paste and catching whoever wasn't paying attention last time. The last 1% is an artform. And hey, if you don't like the NYT calling anyone being a massive asshole on the internet a troll, get the rest of the internet from doing that first.

Unfortunately, once the mainstream press picks up a term it defines hat it will mean going forward. Stopping that is like trying to stop the tide.

It doesn't have to be incorrect information. It can just be a post made to enrage.

Like going on a holocaust survivors forum and posting 'I've been to Treblinka. Doesn't seem too hard.'

That's a flame or flamebait; people who post those are flamers; a term that has fallen from use and now is encompassed by troll.

Re:Once again the dead tree press screws ups a...

[spiralx]

http://www.geocities.com/spiralxuk/trolls.html

From the heyday of /. trolling when we had our own hidden sids and community. I still meet up with a couple of guys I met here through trolling almost 8 years on :)

Re:Once again the dead tree press screws ups a...

[betterunixthanunix]

Two questions: when did "troll" become respectable, and when did trolling require any effort? Trolling is as artistic and respectable as blowjob porn (if you'll pardon the expression), except that the only people who want it are the people who "produce" it. Maybe trolling was a funny prank in the 1980s, but in the 21st century it is an annoying waste of time and electricity.

Re:Once again the dead tree press screws ups a...

[Anonymous Coward]

No problem. Still fun. You lose.

Re:Once again the dead tree press screws ups a...

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Still stupid, you lose.

Re:Once again the dead tree press screws ups a...

[spankymonker]

I remember alt.folklore.urban threads so funny that I could hardly read them through tears! In retrospect, trolling had a twofold purpose, first to entertain, and second, to build community through mild hazing. Through this process, newcomers came to understand the inside jokes. In contrast, I find the portrait of trolling as presented by the article to be depressing - trolls as malicious anarchists who seek only chaos.

Re:Once again the dead tree press screws ups a...

[Anonymous Coward]

probably? whatever, obviously you don't know what you are talking about

"having emotional control over a group of people"

You mean like art?

Re:Once again the dead tree press screws ups a...

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Huh?

Incoming Shitstorm

[Anonymous Coward]

More press for 4chan. The /b/tards are going to be pissed/won't notice at all.

Obligatory Family Guy trolling

[Yvan256]

Jets sucks, Knicks sucks, Yankees sucks, Krypton sucks.

you misspelled incendiary

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it was due to that 700 meg dictionary update that just rolled out...

Yes, but...

[postermmxvicom]

There is apparently a cut off point. Once the post has so many caps it filters it. But, if it has so many caps, but not a large enough percentage, it un-filters it.

So I suppose, there are more questions to answer:

1) At what amount of CAPS characters does the filter turn on?

2) At what percentage does it then turn off?

3) How does it quantify repetitiveness and what is its threshold?

4) How can you achieve the maximum appearance of CAPS and repetitiveness, but circumvent the filters?

Re:Yes, but...

[Spy der Mann]

So I suppose, there are more questions to answer:

1) At what amount of CAPS characters does the filter turn on?

OVER NINE THOUSAND!!!!!!

(Sorry, had to do it :P )

False premise since you cannot rape an ugly chick

[Anonymous Coward]

that would only be doing her a favor. Same for the nerd.

                              tHE mASTER

Slashcode...

[moosesocks]

Is there any option in the slashcode that would allow taco to give trolls a +1 bonus for this article only?

Seems fitting.....

this is probably

[master5o1]

this is probably the only news post that you cant be modded 'offtopic' for, however troll is still allowed

Re:i don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

how 'bout wrapping yer lips 'round my COCK!?!!

Not your average internet troll

[Vexorian]

I just RTFA, and these guys are not internet trolls, they are just utter idiots.

Re:Not your average internet troll

[Anonymous Coward]

I just RTFA, and these guys are not internet trolls, they are just utter idiots.

No, they're extremely intelligent, and that's the problem. An intelligent sociopath is never good news.

Re:Not your average internet troll

[Vexorian]

Well, actually I somehow failed to specify, I was just talking about the ones who thought that trolling that dead boy's family was a lulz, the rest of the trolls described are ok as trolls, I guess.

In Soviet Russia...

[Anonymous Coward]

Al Gore figures out how to turn up the volume to 11!

You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[Louis Savain]

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...

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[DeathGod321]

And to add to that: By the time it's the year of Linux on the desktop, every nerd will complain that it's too dumbed down. (Not that any of us will still be alive.) Trollin ain't easy.

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Speaking of clueless nerds...

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[paulgrant]

I'll bite - what do you have against Turing? I take it his ai-test? and whats ur problem with quantum computing?

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[Digital End]

That ladies, is how you f-ing troll. A+ friend, good work.

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[Eli Gottlieb]

Wow, this one actually got modded Troll. You struck a nerve there.

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[Ticklemonster]

lmao if I'd posted that I'd have been marked a troll for sure.

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[Louis Savain]

lmao if I'd posted that I'd have been marked a troll for sure.

What's really funny is that I meant every word.

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[mu22le]

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.

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[jay-be-em]

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.

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[wiz_80]

it is not OK to criticize any homosexual regardless of how wrong they are because that makes you a homophobic

That would make you "a homophobe", or "homophobic" - not "a homophobic".

This post brought to you by the National Socialist Grammarian Party.

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[Anonymous Coward]

congratulations, you are now a fully operational slashbot

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[plantman-the-womb-st]

The mob is Rome.

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[sir fer]

shut up, dumbass.

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[lena_10326]

You are also modded down if you identify yourself as a female posting a negatively critical comment. Topic does not matter.

Conversely, you're modded up if you're a female who says she dates nerds.

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[aproposofwhat]

Louis, I find your ideas intriguing and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter (even if it's full of your usual half-baked shit).

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[Anonymous Coward]

A very well reasoned and intelligent post. You made some insightful points there. So, what are you wearing?

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[Bastard of Subhumani]

Man-made global warning is an exception. Anything said about it, whether for or against, is a troll.

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[Anonymous Coward]

by far paul graham gave the best defnition of Troll

"trolling is a lot like graffiti. Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally making a mark on the world."
anu all of you /. junkies i request you to RTFA , don't frickin hijack the thread for heck of it

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[spiralx]

I seem to remember writing something on this some years ago... :)

http://www.geocities.com/spiralxuk/howto.html

Ah, happy memories...

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[n1ckml007]

No you're wrong, the trolling department is two doors down!

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[daybot]

I was modded down half of the time because I was too exited to write clearly

You'll get there eventually... :)

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[Anonymous Coward]

tits or GTFO

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[wild_berry]

Pls not to feed the trolls. lulz.

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[RespekMyAthorati]

shut up, dumbass.

C'mon: that should be at least +2 funny.

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[Cassander]

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.

Excellent post. (Where's my mod points when I want them?)

Something a lot of us geeks don't realize until much later in life (if at all) is that this applies to face-to-face interactions as well. It gets harder to do the "take the time to justify reasoning without offending" bit in meatspace, though...

Re:You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

[Sardaukar86]

I reckon there's some value in the Moderation Log being more like an actual LOG. It could be interesting to see the various mods in the order applied (anonymously of course) before the final score, effectively documenting the thinking process of the /. organism.

Troll Cars

[TheMidnight]

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:Troll Cars

[consonant]

Oh yeah, and Microsoft is awesome, Linux will die in 2009, Bush was the best president ever, and Internet memes are cool.

Okay now you've gone too far..

Re:frosty piss

[afaik_ianal]

NSFW Warning: Contains nudity.

Why don't more forums used comment ratings like /.

[Deslock]

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 /.?

Little Steins up to Daddy's tricks

[Anonymous Coward]

Trying to buy a World Championship.

Here was tonight's starting Yankees lineup:

1. J. Damon (DH)
2. D. Jeter (SS)
3. B. Abreu (RF)
4. A. Rodriguez (3B)
5. J. Giambi (1B)
6. R. Cano (2B)
7. X. Nady (LF)
8. I. Rodriguez (C)
9. M. Cabrera (CF)

---- A. Pettitte (P)

Gee, it was sure nice the Yankees let the Angels participate in their intrasquad All-Star game.

BTW Pettitte got shelled and LAA won the game, 12-6.

Re:i don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 Lulz

Re:PLEASE EXPLAIN! CAPSLOCK REPITITION FILTER FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

you think I forgot to click on AC, eh! heh I got you beat! I remembered this time!

SNAPE KILLS AERITH WITH HIS SLED!

[Anonymous Coward]

So does this mean that no post on this thread can be off-topic?

Re:SNAPE KILLS AERITH WITH HIS SLED!

[Anonymous Coward]

MOD PARENT OFFTOPIC

MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, I see it has been already.

Oh.

Ah, I'd just like to say that RON PAUL has a very interesting philosophy and it would perhaps be worthwhile for people to listen to what he has to say.

The best troll in the world was Andy Kaufman

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The best troll in the world was Andy Kaufman

[dreddnott]

Might be one of the best comments on this article.

Andy was before my time, but the Man on the Moon film helped introduce me to him. What a guy.

It seems like the bar has been lowered for trolling, and even the word 'troll' gets flung around as an insult to people with whom you simply disagree, whether or not they are misrepresenting their true beliefs.

I am reminded of the image macro of the old lady with the superimposed text "Back in the days trolling meant something".

Re:The best troll in the world was Andy Kaufman

[lilomar]

Very funny Andy. You can knock it off now.

Heh, it's weev.

[Anonymous Coward]

Penisnerd is still a faggot, though.

Re:Heh, it's weev.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who?

Is it more trolls or

[heroine]

less tolerance. Previously it cost money to read all opinions. Now the mainstream opinions are free. Does that support conformance?

This was how it was done.

[juuri]

Trolling USENET was an art on to itself. The alt.config.X wars were quite stellar.

This is how I did it you cracklin' ass whippersnappers.

Re:This was how it was done.

[oliderid]

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.

Re:This was how it was done.

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't agree with you more

--
You are a fag

Re:i don't understand

[johanatan]

Mod parent up.

So I take it no one RTFA?

[Stevenovitch]

What was the deal with the rolls-royce?

Christopher Poole is not moot's real name

[WDot]

In an interview with Time magazine moot said his real name was Christopher Poole, and this article says the same thing. The only problem is that his real name is not Christopher Poole.

Maybe it's the fact that his initials spell "CP," otherwise expanded as child porn. Or maybe that his last name is Poole, a possible reference to the "Pool's Closed" meme. Or maybe it's the fact that the day that article went live, moot made the headline of /b/ "HAHAHA YOU GOT TROLLED FAGGOTS!" You'd think that if this guy did all this research, he would have caught it by now. What else in this article is suspect?

I TROLLED THE NYT

[KingTank]

I tricked Mattathias Schwartz into writing that shit.

Re:Why don't more forums used comment ratings like

[CodeBuster]

How come other forums don't use a moderation system like /.?

Well, not everyone can be as enlightened and 133t as we Slashdotters are after all...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Newspaper Press Platform Tour

[ScottCooperDotNet]

Yes, and getting to see the process of production at The Boston Globe's second set of 4 presses in Billerica was a treat I got a few months ago. Although they print several things, generally 3 presses are for Globes, 1 for NYTs. Here's a slightly slimmer version of what I wrote up right after seeing the operation:

Our first stop was the engraving room, and like most of the printing process is now largely automated. The platform receives electronic copies of each paper and section it prints, these are then laser-enscribed onto various curved plates. Two 12 foot long machines laser engrave the blank plates, but the machines are entirely closed with only a small midnight window from which one can only tell if the machine is working or idle.

We did not spend much time in there, but among the interesting details is that it takes 4 plates per color page. There was also a stack of finished plates, each longer than the page that it was to print by about seven inches. The top has a about a three inch blank space, presumably to fit into the presses, with the bottom 4 bent at an angle to lock into the machines. If I had the chance I would have asked for more details from the staff in engraving, but they were in the midst of changing editions and with that creating new plates for the color front pages of the papers.

For a black page, only a single plate is needed. Color pages require 4, for the black, red, yellow, and blue (not 100% sure here, there might be two colors of red instead).

The next stop was the presses themselves, which are these four grand contraptions appearing three stories tall. Each one is painted yellow, with red industrial staircases and walkways winding around them. They are so massive in fact I could not tell where the blank paper came in, but from seeing the outcome below I would guess newsprint rolls are loaded up top.

The paper snakes down together as if it was a conveyor belt, and moves at such a speed one cannot tell what paper or section is being printed. Until the bottom-most machine the paper is an incredibly long single sheet, only being cut and folded at the last press step.

It is very loud, but this is to be expected, as the presses make up to 45,000 papers an hour (I believe that is per press, but I'm not sure. It was explained to me as we walked among the presses).

Taking a stop in the main watch room, there were several jump-suited men waiting around a table for the next edition plates to be complete so they can climb among the machines and install them. The operator stands guard, watching the LCD displays and analog meters.

The printed papers are picked up right off the press by a special conveyor system which grabs each copy at the center of the fold; Each paper is grabbed individually. This system conveyors from the floor into the ceiling above the watch room, right in front of the glass.

Quality-checking the paper, the operator opens a special window to the conveyor system to pull a freshly printed copy out of the fast moving line. He quickly verifies the text is even on the page, the color items look good, and the pages go in order. The four color cross in the upper right of the paper is used to verify the proper alignment.

From there we followed the process back to the main floor. This area is called the mail room, and it is where the sections are put together, bundled and palletized. The conveyor system, from which the papers start at floor level in the press room arrive in the mail room well above reach of the workers.

About 35 feet off the ground there are 4 conveyors (one per press) that split the papers up into 2 and then 4 conveyor segments. These 4 segments then go into special machines which grab the top of the paper and have blowers that opens the paper into a V shape. This is why the paper is not folded in the center but slightly below; It is to automate this process. The non-time-critical sections are dropped in there, such as the Arts. These sections are pre-printed earlier in the day.

At each point

Re:Does trolling happen on Macs too?

[Anonymous Coward]

We would never dream of flaming you. We will just remember your impairment and speak slowly.

Don't seem racy and sexy to me

[Anonymous Coward]

You have weird humour sense of~

Re:Why don't more forums used comment ratings like

[religious freak]

sometimes mod points are misused in ideological arguments

SOMETIMES? I'm afraid I must disagree with that. I think, depending on the argument it is *guaranteed* to happen.

I think the best solution would be to create a kind of "web" (or insert your favorite buzzword) of interconnected people. When an article pops up, you only see the responses of your friends, or your friends and highly rated comments (unless you make them your foe), or your friends and a random listing of new posters. It would all be your choice. If you're a new user, you get random posts, until you choose enough people that you've got your own little "web".

I think this would allow for intelligent discussion among people you actually want to hear from. If you're intelligent, maybe (gasp!) you're friends with people that don't share your view, but would still like to hear your perspective.

This would allow the isolationist asshats to isolate themselves in their little group-think cliques and allow those who wish to share perspective to congregate together as well.

My question is: why have I never seen THIS kind of comment system?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Trolling: truth is greater than social pretense

[Anonymous Coward]

People live in illusion. Stupid people enforce the illusion on smarter people through passive aggression. All through guilt and the expectation of a social contract by which we agree not to disrupt each other's private realities.

John Gruber, HipCrime, the GNAA and HAQR are eternal in my mind. Heroes, they spoke for truth in an age of lies.

YHBT, or not.

Re:Why don't more forums used comment ratings like

[inKubus]

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?!?!

One of the best trolls on USENET

[Pig Hogger]

One of the strangest trolls on USENET is happenning right now on news.admin.net-abuse.email. The thing is that instead of ONE individual trolling the froup, about 50 individuals are trolling ONE PERSON, a spammer named Jamie Baillie with extremely poor social skills who is quite abusive and is a legend when it comes to complain to ISPs.

The situation has been fluctuating for more than 5 years on news.admin.net-abuse.email, and currently, the Jamie Baillie activity is at a historic peak.

Re:One of the best trolls on USENET

[martinw89]

Thanks, that was really interesting. This and the NYT article have been something new to read.

Tubes

[XaN-ASMoDi]

Do Internet Trolls live under the series of tubes?

Re:Tubes

[Eli Gottlieb]

Exactly. They live in the test chambers.

What does this mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is a troll?

Re:Does trolling happen on Macs too?

[KGIII]

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:Bain?

[TaoPhoenix]

Leave Barbara Bain alone!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Bain

Re: FTW

[TaoPhoenix]

I don't browse at -1, I browse with a length modifier +4. Anything that took that much work to post is worth looking at. One of these days I'll even click all the weird links in those Dali-Esque long political trolls.

Not a +5, Troll

[nacturation]

What's a troll?

It's a moderation that's impossible to get when your resulting moderated score is higher than the default score.

I will hereby sacrifice tons of karma for the mods to try in vain to moderate this to +5, Troll. Sadly, it'll never get there.
 

Re: Kittens!

[TaoPhoenix]

In Soviet Russia, Kittens kill god.

not even worth a fap

[dartmongrel]

this website is a waste of my time. That's it, I'm going back over to 4chan.

Re: record stores.

[TaoPhoenix]

Did you get reverse trolled, NYCL?

I'd say the RIAA qualifies as a 'Family' with a capital F in the Sicilain sense. In that case, he was partaking of truth, even if not the whole truth or nothing but the truth.

Re:grammar enforcer alert:

[TaoPhoenix]

Don't go for turbo-meta-troll creds for jumping on my spelling error. I at least avoided Godwin.

Re: tacos FTW!

[TaoPhoenix]

In his honor, I borrowed his famous phrase to test the mettle of a potential date, and when she left, I learned she was a lightweight.

Re:PLEASE EXPLAIN! CAPSLOCK REPITITION FILTER FAIL

[KGIII]

Oh, wait. I took the bait.

I believe the correct response to not be 42 but rather Epic Fail. :D

Re:pump Karma

[Anonymous Coward]

so give him +1 to annoy him.

What about macs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) 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 NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite 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 Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.

Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

Well, that's the funny thing

[Moraelin]

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:Well, that's the funny thing

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a big difference between critiquing an idea or conception about the world, and critiquing a person directly.

Rather than saying that Gallieo flamed the pope, I would say he was going after the official church vision of the world. The Pope decided to take that challenge as a threat to the church. I would say that the Pope overreacted in this case.

This is very different from someone harassing parents of a kid who committed suicide, because some random kid in their grief posting a random comment on a web page. They are attacking the person, not any idea.

Re:Well, that's the funny thing

[dkixk]

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.

Yes. Not many know this, but the orignal Socratric dialogues were written in Greek hx0r and the g00d city would have been ruled by the l33t. So, clearly, down moderating some pissant malcontent on /. is morally equivalent to killing Socrates.

Re:Well, that's the funny thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent non-traditional insight on the Galileo v. Church conflict.

Yesterday I was reading about the various theses concerning the relationship between Science and Religion (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_religion, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religion-science/) and the issue of trolling seems to be very relevant to the discussion. Some people seem take more pleasure in upsetting others than finding and sharing truth, which may be a significant factor in starting serious physical conflict. This sophmoric attitude is quite common in classrooms - there always seems to be that one student that focuses solely on exploiting the professor's slip-up rather than genuinely trying to learn.

This sophomoric attitude is also found outside the classroom and I'm surprised that others haven't alluded to the pop culture trolls. In my mind the O'Reilly v Colbert thing is a perfect example of a flame war - heavy on the rhetoric, light on the reasoning. Sadly, these shows are the primary source of many people's political opinions. However, Socratic trolling does have a useful function in using humor and outrage to goad people from apathy and ignorance to concern and knowledge.

Unfortunately, the masses become gridlocked in these generally useless flame wars. Rather than visiting the library and reading a well-researched book or article on a given subject to expand his/her view and ground his/her opinion in firm reason and evidence, the typical person arbitrary takes up a cause and fights using tactics and rhetorical ammo gleaned from fellow trolls. The intellectual move from opinion to knowledge (or at least knowledgeable opinion) is rarely made. Thus the internet forums and pop culture: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The modern path to knowledge:

1)complete ignorance
2)an issue presents itself in the news, /., or firsthand experience
3)wikipedia
4)well-researched article presenting broad contours of the issue - including context, history, arguments, and recent developments
5)sources referenced in the well-researched article

This is supposed to be learned in college and applied to the rest of life. But the path is time-consuming, intellectually challenging, and fails to deliver the smug pleasure of 'clever' name-calling and false superiority. Therefore it's no surprise that most people are troll-like in their opinion gathering and spreading.

Re:Well, that's the funny thing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Actually he was given a choice of either living in exile or execution. And if you want to get technical he wasn't trolling in the sense of just pissing people off. He was actually trying to learn about the essence of life.

Once you consider his view of life (and death) his choice doesn't seem that irrational:

That soul, I say, herself invisible, departs to the invisible world to the divine and immortal and rational: thither arriving, she lives in bliss and is released from the error and folly of men, their fears and wild passions and all other human ills, and forever dwells, as they say of the initiated, in company with the gods

Re:Well, that's the funny thing

[ksd1337]

So in the future, we'll all realize Twitter was a great philosopher or something and we'll all mourn.

Re:Well, that's the funny thing

[Moraelin]

Heh. Seeing that worse people have been lionized or even sanctified later, it's a possibility, yeah :P

Re:Well, that's the funny thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Galileo merely confirmed the copernican system and when he was summoned to rome he was found guilty of heresy. He then persisted in publishing his findings and was then brought in front of the inquisition, where under the threat of torture he disavowed his belief in the moving earth. He was also heard leaving the trial saying "and yet it does move." He was then blinded and died in disgrace.

Thanks Pope

Just frustrating you, LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, Louis, us high-karma moderators know you crave those Troll mods --- we were just frustrating you with Funny!

How's your MOBE2001 alter-ego coming along?

Re:Just frustrating you, LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

> How's your MOBE2001 alter-ego coming along?

He's the only Slashdotter I've EVER seen score a "-1, Insightful"!

Re:Does trolling happen on Macs too?

[Corporate Troll]

Apple is for people who believe in the god Jobs,

What I find funny here is that you capitalized Jobs, but not God. Interesting ;-)

The NYT is dying

[commodoresloat]

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

[commodoresloat]

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.

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

By taking the name of the popular operating system 'windows' and replacing the last bit with 'blows' (which is a colloquialism meaning 'bad' or 'inferior') you've just given the name a whole new meaning, while not really changing the sound of the word too much! this is the epitome of both wit and humour! other highly amusing (and often underused) slag terms are 'windoze' (doze meaning 'light sleep' or 'knap') and {'M$'} (which usually stands for MicroSoft, but in this case, the 'S' is deliciously replaced with a dollar sign to represent how they unfairly charge for their products!) This is a new wave of humour, people. I think we should riddle all our posts, replies and (where applicable) everyday speech with these little beauties to forever represent that we, the open source community, know better than everyone else!

Re:I don't get it

[BigDXLT]

Games.

Oh, let me clarify: modern games that look all pretty and stuff. Tux racer doesn't quite count.

Sure, not linux's fault but that's too bad.

(Dual-boot box is superior to single-boot boxes btw.)

"Weev," dead at 24

[commodoresloat]

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:"Weev," dead at 24

[rawrslashdot]

Truly an American icon.

No, he's an hero.

Re:"Weev," dead at 24

[RLiegh]

"Truly an American an hero"?

Oh yeah -that rolls easily off the tonuge!

Re:Does trolling happen on Macs too?

[KGIII]

Want to know the saddest (or funniest) part about that? Most people here are athiestic and I'm mostly pissed right the hell off so God gets a capital but god Jobs meaning lowercase to show intentionally not elevating him.

It means nothing to you probably but, well, I went to church this month to actually have the memorial service for my mother. (Nope, not playing on anything, just call yer mum when you get a moment and she'll probably appreciate it.) But, either way, my point is not much... God, as a figurative being gets a capitalization and Jobs is less than so he gets none.

I don't know if that makes a damned bit of sense and trolling won't bug me at this point. (For those who may read this beyond whom I am responding to.)

Anyhow, I guess it is because I used the proper name of Jobs while not using the proper name of God. Err... WTF? I'm not even sure who God is but he's probably not named Steve. My family took it tough, the loss of my mother (just a month ago today actually) but they all smiled when I pointed out (referenced above) that she finaly got us to all go to church with her.

So, yeah, it was odd. To make a morbid answer (sorry for unloading on you and, no, this is quite real and I think I should mention that it is real in light of the topic) I used the capitalization intentionally and after a great deal of thinking. Well, no... If you consider a couple of minutes (which is what it probably really took as I erased it a few times) a great deal of thinking then I did so. I didn't ponder over it for a week or two.

Err... The irony is the above is really the reason. *sighs*

More like, "Thank the God that hath stood before me." As compered to, "Holy fucking shit a god damn that fucker is one huge bastard and he scares the shit out of me."

Oh dear

[Anonymous Coward]

"Lulz" ... a corruption of "LOL" or "laugh out loud"

Even writers for mainstream media outlets are /b/tards these days.

Re:grammar enforcer alert:

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

Don't go for turbo-meta-troll creds for jumping on my spelling error. I at least avoided Godwin.

I wouldn't do that. I'm not a grammar Nazi. (oops, there... I did it...)

Re:i don't understand

[Jellybob]

Otherwise known as the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.

Re:PLEASE EXPLAIN! CAPSLOCK REPITITION FILTER FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

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Re:Does trolling happen on Macs too?

[Corporate Troll]

It's okay, just vent. I'm an atheist myself, but I still tend to capitalize God. Probably out of habit.

Re:Not to be out done...

[lena_10326]

42

...it will get more ~desu.

[Anonymous Coward]

        desu DESU! desu DESU desu desu! desu DESU desu desu! DESU DESU DESU! desu DESU DESU! DESU DESU! desu! DESU! DESU DESU DESU! desu desu desu! desu desu desu desu! DESU DESU DESU! desu DESU DESU! DESU desu DESU DESU! DESU DESU DESU! desu desu DESU! desu desu desu desu! DESU DESU DESU!desu DESU DESU! desu desu! DESU! desu desu desu! DESU desu desu! DESU DESU DESU! DESU desu! desu! desu DESU desu DESU desu DESU!

Your comment was viral. Try less whitespace and/or lesstition.

      D D D D D
      E E E E E
      S S S S S
      U U U U U

Re:frosty piss

[aproposofwhat]

Funny as fuck - please mod parent up!

Re:Not to be out done...

[aproposofwhat]

LMFAO - not a troll, but a fully functional Turing-complete machine gets modded -1 Troll :P

Re:Why don't more forums used comment ratings like

[rhakka]

uh, doesnt this moderation system basically allow that?

mod your friends up and browse at a high level.

what possible improvement would actually removing the links to other posts bring?

Re:Why don't more forums used comment ratings like

[abstract daddy]

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.

Sometimes? Try all the fucking time. The average Slashdotter doesn't have the intelligence to actually argue about anything, so instead they just downmod anyone they don't like (and yes, they will also downmod anyone who points this out to them). What's even worse is that getting bad karma will limit how many posts you can make per 24 hours, how quickly you can post them and how many people will see them (I recall that -1 comments are filtered out by default). So essentially the system punishes you if your views deviate from mainstream ideology. What's ironic is that Slashdot submitters are tripping over themselves to post the next "our freedom of speech/something is being taken away" story while the commenters go on and on about Orwell and the rise of the police state while being oblivious to their own 1984-like behavior. Very, very few people truly believe in freedom of speech.

So my question is this: How come other forums don't use a moderation system like /.?

Because it sucks so much ass. Because it's broken beyond repair. Because its only purpose is to empower left-wing fanatics who are most likely to abuse any power given to them. I'd rather have complete anarchy than the system used here (in fact, I always prefer to play on unmoderated game servers because the moderated ones are guaranteed to be run by a delusional powertripper).

Re:Kibo.

[MadMidnightBomber]

You're Allowed.

lolll

[Anonymous Coward]

HEY GUISE HOW DO I HACK!

Re:Does trolling happen on Macs too?

[YttriumOxide]

I capitalise "God" when referring to the christian god or any other god that simply goes by that name. If I want to refer to "a god", then I do not capitalise it.

Basically, it's nothing to do with the religion, simply whether it's a "proper name" or a general noun.

That big guy with a white beard, God, is the god of the christians.

(and yep, also an atheist here)

Re:Does trolling happen on Macs too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you're right, Mac users are far too intelligent to troll. I want to add that numerous scientific studies have shown that Windows users are less educated and less intelligent than Mac users. Statistically, Mac users are also more wealthy than Windows users and often have a profession associated with high social status.

Re:Why don't more forums used comment ratings like

[joaobranco]

So my question is this: How come other forums don't use a moderation system like /.?

I believe that may be a matter of scale. Moderation requires a certain number of interested readers, meta-moderation a greater number still. If you look at most web-forums, the actual contributers (not necessarily the readers) are a few dozens, if that. To get results out of moderation I'm guessing you need at least 10 times that.

Trolling is not the same as being provocative.

[goodmanj]

Going against the status quo is not trolling. Socrates and Galileo were asking provocative questions to encourage dialogue and discovery. An internet troll is hoping only to *destroy* the dialogue.

These two things are not just different, they're almost exact opposites.

To put it another way: flaming the mayor is not the same as yelling "FIRE!" in a town-hall meeting.

Its not a 'game', neither it is a 'joke'.

[unity100]

so a troll came to a forum/topic, and posted some controversial, incorrect stuff.

and you didnt 'fall for it', and therefore proved that you can 'see through' that behaviour. and that you're an internet veteran.

good for you.

bad for public.

someday some youngster or someone who doesnt have much info on that particular topic is going to come to that thread through a search engine result, read that troll post, and get at best confused, if not mislead.

Re:Its not a 'game', neither it is a 'joke'.

[Headw1nd]

So what you're telling me is that the internet is serious business?

Re:Why don't more forums used comment ratings like

[Anonymous Coward]

So my question is this: How come other forums don't use a moderation system like /.?

Because it is not a "moderation system" it is a censorship system, one open to abuse at that. In real forums moderators are appointed.

I registered at slashdot once. I posted one comment that was expressed my communist anti-capitalist philosophy. I was awarded one single negative karma point for the post and was then unable to post again for 24 hours. That is blatant politically biased CENSORSHIP - not moderation.

Conveniently, this arrangement absolves Slashdot itself of any decisions about censorship.

Thus I always post AC now, where I cannot be gagged, but much of my posts will never be seen, still effectively censored, but at least I'm free to post my thoughts.

Slashdot's "moderation" system has been usurped and made into a censorship system by those with the time and inclination.

It does not foster free and productive discussion, thus it will never be adopted by real discussion forums.

IOW, you're karma whore

[Anonymous Coward]

Then I learned and built my karma up.

IOW, you're karma whore.

Re:IOW, you're karma whore

[slimjim8094]

Dumbass. IOW he learned to have a reasoned argument and built up karma for the posts that karma was designed to reward.

As was this post, aside from my initial comment. But I stand by it ;)

Re:Why don't more forums used comment ratings like

[Anonymous Coward]

... further, it seems to me that Slashdot has a very high troll to genuine user ratio. Much higher than traditional forums with appointed moderators that steward free and productive discussions.

That is probably the real reason why other forums don't cop-out on site content policy like slashdot does with its user-run censorship system. (Based on points? Like it's some kind of competition?)

I think that should answer your question sufficiently.

You are a lame numb nuts farkus punk thief

[Anonymous Coward]

This is officially crossing the line!

Wait a second...

[KDAWSON sucks]

You're a Troll If You Disagree With the Crowd

So the common thread on slashdot is that everyone hates KDAWSON. And I write about it so that all of the users who didn't already know.

...and I have bad karma because of that?!?

Something smells like Goatse here...

The point is: THINK first

[Moraelin]

Well, that's sorta the whole point: they're not the same thing, so _think_ before reaching for the handy-dandy categorization.

To us, Socrates sounds certainly like a smart guy who was just trying to make them think. To them his asking people uncomfortable question was just disruptive. Both to society, and to (the established socially-acceptable forms of) dialogue. They seemed to think he fits your "troll" definition to the letter.

They had their own acceptable ways to hold a debate, and for example sophistry was the norm. The aim wasn't even remotely to be _right_ or to determine the truth. It was to get people to nod at your string of fallacies and emotionally charged metaphors. Socrates's insisting on _truth_ and virtue was actively disruptive to their kind of dialogue. His rejection of might-makes-right and tradition-makes-right arguments were disrupting and rejecting about 90% of the political and philosophical debate in Athens at the time.

Was he right? Probably. Did they think he's disruptive and getting in the way of a civilized dialogue? Hell yeah.

And without even getting into something as complex as Socrates's problem, you can see false categorizations in the present day, every day. The most common being that if you disagree with me or point out flaws in anything I've said or done, then most certainly:

- you're just a troll, or

- you're some kind of enemy, or

- you're trying to bully me, or

- you're a shill for the opposition, or

- you're in denial and secretly loving what you openly criticize, or

- you're too stupid to realize I'm right, or about a dozen equally unflattering escape routes.

Especially questioning anything that is already the base of some cognitive dissonance, is a sure way to not provoke much more thought than "auugh, this guy is the enemy and is trying to hurt me."

But you can see the same applied to things as unimportant as games (if you don't like the _exact_ same games I do, then you're probably in denial, a troll or a shill), bug reports (see the recent "how do you deal with bullies? some guy reported _two_ bugs in my software, so he's clearly trying to bully me!" case on Ask Slashdot), fashion, and the Gods know what else. Probably right as we speak, about a million people on the Internet are making just that kind of an inferrence.

So basically that's what I'm trying to say: they are quite different things, so _think_ before reaching for the comfortable hand-waved explanation. What seems like a clear cut case of trolling, _might_ be someone who actually has a point.

Re:The point is: THINK first

[Reziac]

Whilst reading your excellent post, it occurred to me that to understand when something is trolling or not, one must have matured past being susceptible to trolling.

And as to newbies' dumb but honest questions, observationally, I'd estimate that newbies get flamed as trolls more often than actual trolls do.

Re:The point is: THINK first

[Anonymous Coward]

Brilliant post! now shut the fuck up, you insightful nigger!

Ah ha, confused you there didn't I!

Re:The point is: THINK first

[Reziac]

Eeny, meeny, miney, moe,
Catch an AC by the toe,
If he hollers let him go ---

Oh wait. Aren't we supposed to flame trolls? Damn. Now I gotta light the BBQ. BRB.

I live under bridges

[Kashell]

When the internet was more like a truck than a series of tubes, truck drivers would frequently find creative ways to protest high gas prices and put down their overbearing human overlords. Soon enough, they were nicknamed, "trolls".

Re:frosty piss

[couchslug]

You must have sampled American beer.

Re:Why don't more forums used comment ratings like

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

I think for a moderation system like Slashdot's to work well, it needs numbers. When there aren't enough people moderating, it tends to break down -- it's more likely that comments are moderated unfairly etc.

Re:Kibo.

[Anonymous Coward]

Smartass!

how do you explain this ..

[rs232]

'"Lulz" is how trolls keep score. A corruption of "LOL" or "laugh out loud," "lulz" means the joy of disrupting another's emotional equilibrium'

How do you explain this paticular troll in terms of Lulzing. This is someone who has been trolling comp.os.linux.advocacy for over a *decade*, over eight thousand posts since January of this year alone, not to mention its various other aliases.

Re:PLEASE EXPLAIN! CAPSLOCK REPITITION FILTER FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer Trolling D&D!

The "Moon": A Ridiculous Liberal Myth

[spiralx]

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.

Well hopefully...

[Uniquitous]

One day Fortuney and all his ilk will be stabbed in the throat.

Trolls doing good?

[Anonymous Coward]

>> "Fortuny disagreed. In his mind, subjecting epileptic users to flashing lights was justified. âoeHacks like this tell you to watch out by hitting you with a baseball bat,â he told me. âoeDemonstrating these kinds of exploits is usually the only way to get them fixed.â

âoeSo the message is âbuy a helmet,â(TM) and the medium is a bat to the head?â I asked.

âoeNo, itâ(TM)s like a pitcher telling a batter to put on his helmet by beaning him from the mound. If you have this disease and youâ(TM)re on the Internet, you need to take precautions.â A few days later, he wrote and posted a guide to safe Web surfing for epileptics."
----

These people *are* the "hackers." If they weren't posting these images on epileptic forums then, more likely than not, nobody would. He acts like he's ultimately doing the place a good but they're part of the largest group of trolls on the Internet. Any other community of trolls on the Internet is much smaller in comparison and would cause much less harm.

Re:frosty piss

[Anonymous Coward]

No

I prefer Trolling D&D!

[MRe_nl]

That would be "Tunnels and Trolls" ; ).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnels_and_Trolls

This article is like a weird online family reunion

[ElectricTurtle]

Whoa. This article weirded me out so much. First, I was eating burgers cooked by Jason F. like two weeks ago. His friend Zach is my wife's friend from a decade ago. So I keep reading and get to hepkitten and weev. Holy crap. I used idle with them for hours in #insub on idlenet before its untimely demise. #insub used to be the secret base where internet 'culture' was generated (before 4chan) and spread through raids and other things. I was never in on anything big like the epilepsy thing, but this one time they found out some bug in the crappy code of Trillian, and we went to all the #trillian channels on the different IRC networks and killed all the clients. Hilarious. And served them right for using a horrible client.

moot is like the only person in that article I haven't talked to in some way. Perhaps that makes me biased, but I don't think trolling (as Jason F. trolls) is a bad thing. They're pranks, and should be appreciated as such. Different people react to them in different ways, sometimes it ends up making them look bad, like the craigslist experiment, but nobody put a gun to those guys' heads and said 'send embarrassing and nasty things to that complete stranger.' They made themselves look bad, and it doesn't matter that the catalyst was a contrivance.

Re:Does trolling happen on Macs too?

[Lodragandraoidh]

God does not need capitalization when referring to more than one particular god not named God - unless it begins a sentence like this one. Get it? There are many gods throughout history, only one of which is God. The 'god Jobs' is correct usage.

It has nothing to do with atheism. People should really learn the lexicon before typing (and grammar wouldn't hurt either).

Fuck Natallee Holloway

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

Re:False premise since you cannot rape an ugly chi

[Oktober Sunset]

Great, that's lifted the guilt about what I did to your mum last night.

Re:Why don't more forums used comment ratings like

[jamesoutlaw]

I agree ... I think that for a moderation and reputation systems to work properly, a forum needs thousands of active members.

Re:Why don't more forums used comment ratings like

[Anonymous Coward]

I have.
However, I'm not gonna tell you about it. I don't want the slashtards to come to roost.

Re:frosty piss

[TCaptain]

Please, you're not even bringing table stakes to this game.

article is interesting...

[azakem]

It doesn't really disclose anything that is news to the /. community, but it does seem to confirm what many of us suspected. The trolls and chaotic crackers who take action that is actually harmful, whether physically (e.g. the epilepsy attack) or mentally (e.g., the depraved trolls targeting the parents mourning their son) exhibit symptoms commonly associated with NPD, delusional disorder of the grandiose variety, and in some cases APD (the somewhat Orwellian term now used to encompass sociopathy and pyschopathy). This particular variety of troll or cracker (let me call them c-trolls) is self-aggrandizing, viewing himself or herself as vastly superior to the majority of the world's population, rising at times to the level of self-deification (see the comments in the article attributed to Weev). They show little to no remorse when injuries occur, suggesting that they consider their victims as a lesser being, a sort of animal that the c-troll may do with as they please. They defend their actions by blaming the victims for not recognizing their vulnerability. The very idea of warning the victims in a less harmful fashion (perhaps notifying them of the vulnerability rather than using it to crack their skulls) either has not occured to them, or has been considered and dismissed. In either scenario, the actions of the c-trolls show that their purpose is entirely self-serving despite the warped quasi-altruistic motive that they proffer in defense. It is easy to view these persons with revulsion due to their visible lack of empathy and their desire to manipulate basic human emotions to cause harm. Still, these c-trolls are themselves deserving of pity, in that they have personally experienced traumatic events which have harmed their psyche, or suffer from psychological disorders that prevent them from interacting normally with other persons. However, unless the disorder is severe, these persons cannot shed themselves of moral responsibility for their actions.
 
This of course assumes that the persons interviewed in the article gave truthful responses to the reporter's questions. Given that many of these c-trolls seem to wish for admiration for their deeds while maintaining their anonymitity, it is unlikely that the majority of those interviewed gave false answers about the philosophy behind their actions.
 
Also, I would like to point out that Tycho and Gabe explained the phenomena of your average irritating yet harmless troll in only three panels, while the New York Times required several paragraphs.

Trolls tell unpopular political truths

[Anonymous Coward]

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-naÃve" 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."

NYT article: Malwebolence

When it becomes taboo to talk about certain topics, much less tie them together in the kind of truth that saves groups from themselves, the only people who speak the truth are some outsiders (other outsiders are just loser posers). Trolls -- using anonymity, hacker technique for obscurity, and some basic psychological knowledge -- are information terrorists for the truth.

CORRUPT's reponse: in Defense of Unpopular Truths, Deceit is Honesty

Internet trolls tell us what we're afraid to admit we see, even if they do it offensively.

Re:Why don't more forums used comment ratings like

[Anonymous Coward]

Death threats are ok if you are behind seven proxies.

http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/7_Proxies

No, seriously, he flamed the pope personally

[Moraelin]

There is a big difference between critiquing an idea or conception about the world, and critiquing a person directly.

Rather than saying that Gallieo flamed the pope, I would say he was going after the official church vision of the world. The Pope decided to take that challenge as a threat to the church. I would say that the Pope overreacted in this case.

Dude, read that again: the pope had actually _encouraged_ him to publish his new theory.

There _have_ been narrow-minded officials of the church (e.g., Cardinal Bellarmine who had forbidden him in 1616 to defend heliocentrism), and even popes. So I'm not saying that the Church as a whole was all scientific or anything. But Pope Urban VIII was not one of them. He was actually pretty open-minded renaissance kind of guy (well, in as much as possible for a church official.) Plus, he was a friend and admirer of Galileo's (well, until he got flamed, anyway.) Previously, while still only Cardinal Barberini, he had actually supported Galileo in 1616 and opposed Bellarmine.

And how Galileo repaid that, well, I've already written that, read that paragraph again. It wasn't just attacking Geocentrism (which, as mentioned, the pope had actually allowed him to.) He literally made fun of the pope, by mis-representing his position, distorting his words, and putting them into the mouth of a ridiculous character called The Stupid. No matter how I want to look at it, that's not about science, it's a personal attack. He _was_ attacking the person, not just the Geocentrism idea.

The only thing I'll agree with is that Pope _did_ overreact, and did a bit of abuse of power and of justice in the process too. They had a screwed-up idea of separating the powers, back then, mostly because the various monarchs had reacted very unfavourably (and sometimes violently) when the popes had tried to dominate them on secular maters too. So the church had jurisdiction _only_ over matters of faith. The pope did an 180 degree turn and made Galileo's position a matter of faith, just so he could drag him before his own judges _and_ forbid the offensive book internationally. Otherwise he would have had to leave it to the secular authorities.

But, anyway, seriously, imagine if I were to pull a Galileo maneuver on your message. Quote your sentences prefixed by, say, "Stupid Guy says:". Distort them as I see fit. Ridicule them as some retarded thing that can't even follow elementary logic. Regardless of what scientific or historical message I'd promote with that maneuver, it still doesn't excuse that kind of flamebait, and it still doesn't make it anything else than flaming.

FINALLY!

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone using the term "troll" correctly.

"The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a pseudo-naÃve tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait."

"Trolling" refers to throwing a baited line out and seeing who takes the bait. Not acting like a semi-human creature sitting under a bridge and harassing billy goats.

Re:PLEASE EXPLAIN! CAPSLOCK REPITITION FILTER FAIL

[nomadic]

ME TOO PLS!!!!

Where would we be without the trolls?

[FiloEleven]

Liek any good slashdotter, I haven't RTFA, but it seems to me that trolls are an important part of message groups because they throw some chaos into the system. There are countless times when I have been browsing Slashdot and seen some realy great +5 coments. When I check out the parent chain for context, I often find that there's a -1 trooll or -1 flamebait in there somewhere. If that troll hadn't posted and someone took the bait, we would be all the poorer for it, missing out on something realy inlightening or at least funny.

Not that I advocate trolling--I never do it myself (or if I do, it's anonymous and you can't prove it was meee!) But in any organic system (which message boards are, since they're composed of human output) you need that element of randomness to shake things up, keep things from falling into a static (that is, dead) pattern. Trolling is the net equivelent of the street corner preacher or naked cowboy - it can, if done well, make you rethink your assumptions or see things form a different angle, even if or especially if that angle is not the one presented by the troll. Indeed, sometimes when I am trolling I'm surprised to check my comments list and see a +4 or +5 insightful. I never tell that I was just having a bit of fun because i like the karma.

But as the summary says, the earliest definition of a troll is someone who disrupts the online communities. Disruption is not necessarily a bad thing. There are lots of people here who would like to see a disruption in the American political system. The whole civil rights movement was based on disrupting the system, and we are far better off for it. Hell, the COUNTRY was created by a disruption of England's policies towards the colonies.

Sometimes I wear a sandwitch board sign that says "THE END HAS PASSED" AND refuse to respond to people when they ask me about it. When they start to walk away, I begin explaining what I mean until they turn around, then I stop talking again. I don't think anybody agrees with me (i don't agree with myself) but you can see in their eyes that it makes them think. And thinking is what we need more of in america. It's not even about what I say anyway, it's the fact that I'm creating frustration for the other people and myself by only trying to communicate while they are walking away from me. It's the creation of a hopeless communication breakdown that is my intent. I would like to run for office but with the corruption and difficulty to get to somewhere where you make a difference it just won't happen, so this is my patriotic duty.

In summary, trolling is bad because of the sheer amount of noise it creates but it also in a way is good. Agents of entropy are a distasteful but necessary part of the universe. Everyone has the urge to do impuslive and destructive behavior from time to time; this is necessary for the old to give way to the new and (agaiN) to keep the pattern mutating and alive.

Somehow I think...

[Elyneara]

...that the journalist got trolled.

Can you really trust someone who claims to be a troll to that degree not to, at the very least, exaggerate? Just because you talk to someone in person does not mean you are gaining any knowledge about them.

I think the journalist missed a few key points about the 'social trolls,' the people who are trying to prove something through trolling, Vs. Trolls who are just asshats (though the two are not mutually exclusive). The problem is that it's hard to see what's what unless you are really into the community. In otherwords, journalist needed to lurk moar.

However, that girl who shouted racial slurs at white people was hilarious.

You and your little dog too

[Anonymous Coward]

The only joke is Slashdot and its dizzingly infinite array of intentionally misleading, redundant, and downright stupid articles.

Slashdot itself is the scariest fire-breathing-mecha-troll the world has ever seen.

They thought Socrates WAS a pissant malcontent

[Moraelin]

Yes. Not many know this, but the orignal Socratric dialogues were written in Greek hx0r and the g00d city would have been ruled by the l33t. So, clearly, down moderating some pissant malcontent on /. is morally equivalent to killing Socrates.

That's just the thing: they too thought that Socrates was a pissant malcontent. A pretty annoying and disruptive one too. And he was teaching their children to be pissant malcontents too.

The first trolling group...

[argent]

In this message in 1983 a troll who used the pseudonym "Elizabeth Bimmler" started the first major trolling campaign on Usenet, attacking the group net.suicide (a support group for depression). The same group created a semi-automated trolling program under the name Mark V. Shaney. There has been a lot of mythology built up about these campaigns, probably because the person primarily responsible is a well known and respected member of the UNIX establishment, but really they're no different in nature from what the /b/tards do today.

Subject

[Legion303]

It turns out 4chan isn't the internet. The reporter trolled NYT.

It gets worse

[DefenderThree]

You forgot an increasingly popular trend in most forums: ironic humor. Not only is it becoming increasingly (and irritatingly) difficult to differentiate between the genuinely stupid and the trolls, the addition of people "ironically" flaming everyone or trashing the forums is impossible to spot or verify since anyone accused of these things can claim they were doing so "ironically" as an ingenious, super-subtle commentary on forum "culture." Voila! By claiming to use ironic humor, anyone and everyone is now a modern day Oscar Wilde!

Mod Points Used

[Anonymous Coward]

I just used all my mod points to rate 5 random replies as "Troll" just because I could. Am I a passive aggressive faggot? Maybe, but I just rolled you bitches. Booya!

But that's not the point

[Moraelin]

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.

Well, yes, very much so, but nobody is claiming that Socrates really trolled.

What Socrates's execution illustrates is a mode of failure of human judgment. _That_ is the point. That when confronted with some serious and uncomfortable question too many will just back into some form of "OMG, he's an evil man" mode, instead of actually thinking. It's an easy escape hatch, and too many use it.

Yes, the two are not equal. Nobody said they are. But when confronted with someone who challenges your judgment and status quo, would _you_ show the level-headedness and judgment to distinguish between the two? Or would you too slip into the comfortable assumption that he's probably a troll, and you don't need to need twice about what you do? _That_ is the point.

And, no offense, with that "only an idiot" wisecrack and strawman, you don't seem to. You have already decided that only an idiot would disagree with your point of view, before even hearing in which way they disagree. _That_ is the problem. That is what those guys did too, when they executed Socrates. It was easier to assume that he must be some evil guy if he questions their ways, than to actually think whether he's right.

And as you illustrate it, it's not a problem that started and ended with Socrates. Entirely too many on the Internet, and off-line too, reach for the same simple ad-hominem instead of thinking. The "if you disagree with me, or if you question my judgment, you must be an idiot/shill/troll/traitor/terrorist/evil-dude" mentality is just as alive and kicking as in Socrates's time. _That_ is the problem.

But, yes, some people genuinely are trolls. Some are not. The whole point is to be able to distinguish between the two. Socrates's case is just an example where a bunch of people couldn't.

It's easy to write theoretical distinctions like "they're doing it in a way that is unconstructive", but it seems to be hard to actually apply them in practice. They too, for example, thought that Socrates's way of doing it wasn't constructive at all. In fact, that it was outright destructive and dangerous. It's easy to look back in retrospect and see that they were wrong. But when you'll be in their place, and someone questions your judgment, will you do any better? Will you actually try to distinguish the nuances there at all, before reaching for the easy way out? Maybe. Maybe not. I guess neither of us will know until such a situation actually presents itself.

Re:But that's not the point

[Reziac]

A segment of TFA sums it up neatly, and this stands across every era and every level of trolling (including common stuff like kids teasing one another, or Socrates asking his contemporaries uncomfortable questions):

Fortuny proceeded to demonstrate his personal cure for trolling, the Theory of the Green Hair.

"You have green hair," he told me. "Did you know that?"

"No," I said.

"Why not?"

"I look in the mirror. I see my hair is black."

"That's uh, interesting. I guess you understand that you have green hair about as well as you understand that you're a terrible reporter."

"What do you mean? What did I do?"

"That's a very interesting reaction," Fortuny said. "Why didn't you get so defensive when I said you had green hair?" If I were certain that I wasn't a terrible reporter, he explained, I would have laughed the suggestion off just as easily. The willingness of trolling 'victims' to be hurt by words, he argued, makes them complicit, and trolling will end as soon as we all get over it.

[emphasis mine]

Socrates got what was coming to him

[br00tus]

Athens was a democratic society, and Socrates preached against democracy, he was for dictatorship. His followers were mostly wealthy young men, like Critias and Alcibiades, who preferred Sparta to Athens, some of whom sided with Sparta over Athens, destroyed Athens democracy and replaced it with a dictatorship and so on. Socrates was executed for poisoning young minds, which he certainly did.

First Post!

[Anonymous Coward]

First Post!

Drawing the line between trolling and harassment?

[Anonymous Coward]

Forgive me Slashdot, for I have RTFA. Mostly because it was posted as a comment on my blog, in response to the fact that I've recently been trolled.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

The Yahoo message boards had quite a few famous trolls such as CindyBin , Pajerla , Agame , Xsited etc... who at times could get the entire forum into an uproar . It would be an excellent resource for somebody wishing to research trolling however Yahoo shut them down two years ago when threatened with litigation . I don't know whatever happened to the trolls , I guess they just drifted off elsewhere .

So Galileo was right but unkind...

[simplerThanPossible]

While ridiculing a powerful person is naive, socially inept and/or courageous, it's also mean.

For me, trolling is defined by unkindness, not by truth. It's the intention to disrupt and hurt that makes it trolling. Even if done by speaking truth, it's still trolling.

I find that if I want to speak truth, it's straightforward to do it kindly. But not easy, if I'm triggered in some way. In that case, I need to first get over myself.

Don't forget Adequacy.org

[denmon]

Folks who have been around for a while may remember the site adequacy.org, whose members were amazingly effective at constructing believable trolling posts. So much so that there's even a dedicated name for this - the "Adequacy Style Troll" (AST).

From my view this was the high point for trolling - carefully-crafted posts that seemed so logical that most of the way through you thought it was for real, and even by the end of a post and its outrageous conclusion you weren't always sure the poster was kidding.

Typically these posts weren't targeted at a specific person, but a general hot-button issue (Christianity, Linux, etc) and would elicit a lot of amusing responses from people who didn't get the joke.

The archive is still on line at www.adequacy.org, and the Wikipedia entry gives a good overview of the approach.

Anyone have any favorite Adequacy posts they'd like to share?

Re:False premise since you cannot rape an ugly chi

[Anonymous Coward]

WINRAR!

Re:Drawing the line between trolling and harassmen

[PenGun]

Let me guess. You pissed someone off and they did a 'whois' on your domain. Then posted the address they found there.

    Na no way it's that simple.

  You said: "disrupting another's emotional equilibrium."

  Sweeitie you maybe should do something else than run a blog. It may be a bit too much for you dealing with other people's opinions.

Weev's name is Andrew Wbeelsoi. He is just a

[Anonymous Coward]

The weeb loser's name is Andrew Wbeelsoi. He is just a loser not an international man of mystery

Re:frosty piss

[owlstead]

Yes, but this leads to the question: how do trolls procreate?

They seem to be able to do so, judging on the amount of trolls.

my name is jason 2

[Anonymous Coward]

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&q=starbucks&near=Kirkland+Ave,+Kirkland,+WA&fb=1&view=map&cd=1&ll=47.676586,-122.205734&spn=0.007628,0.016565&z=16

Are you "Trollist"?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's clear that we're facing a troubling epidemic, and that these poor cursed individuals need our help more than ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOaS8l5SQrQ

Weev

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew Weev in college - I believe '99 or '00. He was some 14(?) year old genius at JMU. I think he lasted 1 semester before dropping/flunking out. I was told 2 things before meeting him:

1. be nice to him, he comes from an abusive home and he's poor. I believe at the time he was just living with his mom.
2. call him Weev.

IMO that only reason he liked college was the T3 connection. He couldn't afford a decent computer (I believe he had a 286 or 386 when most people had pentiums) and I don't think he could even afford dial-up. He spent all his time on the library computers until his mom came to pick him up.

I don't think I'm surprised by the way things turned out. Moving to the complete other side of the country, assuming a new identity (or no identity), and measuring his success by material wealth all add up to someone who wants to escape/forget their past. For a genius with no guidance, what else would you expect? The story on Weev doesn't do him justice. He's not an internet troll. He's just a really messed up kid.