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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.'"
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!)
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Wow, you mean they're still publishing that?
[Insert pithy quote here]
Perhaps you were just conducting an experiment to see who really RTFA, right?
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.
Slashdot Links. Without saying, "You must be new here," is anyone suprised?
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!
It's a troll honeypot!
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.
We are all just people.
You know, "Weev" on the front page of TFA is EXACTLY what I picture when I think of trolls or that "frosty piss" guy.
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.
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.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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
You had it easy. Back in my day, trolls had to use bridges.
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.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Trolling R&D!
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
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.
Socrates?
Is there any option in the slashcode that would allow taco to give trolls a +1 bonus for this article only?
Seems fitting.....
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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...
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.
NSFW Warning: Contains nudity.
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 /.?
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.
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.
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?!?!
Cool! Amazing Toys.
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.
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.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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.
Oh Fuck
GNAA Just got modded funny
World is burning
Four horsemen spotted
Film at Eleven.
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.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Then I learned and built my karma up.
IOW, you're karma whore.
So what you're telling me is that the internet is serious business?
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.
[emphasis mine]
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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.
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.
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?