Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
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.