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

[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]

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: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

Stay back!

[TrashGod]

It's a troll honeypot!

Golden Age of Trolling

[statemachine]

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

Re:frosty piss

[afaik_ianal]

NSFW Warning: Contains nudity.

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.