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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.'"
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.
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.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
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 /.?
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.