Slashdot Mirror
Web Trolls Winning As Incivility Increases
mdsolar sends this story from the NY Times:
The Internet may be losing the war against trolls. At the very least, it isn't winning. And unless social networks, media sites and governments come up with some innovative way of defeating online troublemakers, the digital world will never be free of the trolls' collective sway. That's the dismal judgment of the handful of scholars who study the broad category of online incivility known as trolling, a problem whose scope is not clear, but whose victims keep mounting. "As long as the Internet keeps operating according to a click-based economy, trolls will maybe not win, but they will always be present," said Whitney Phillips, a lecturer at Humboldt State University and the author of This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, a forthcoming book about her years of studying bad behavior online. "The faster that the whole media system goes, the more trolls have a foothold to stand on. They are perfectly calibrated to exploit the way media is disseminated these days."
Would be fitting if some troll would comment dont you think?
Just respond with a "U mad Bro?"
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Nothing better to do with your time then vandalize sites?
If people dislike slashdot editors, perhaps you could just stop using the site?
Market supply and demand, if ppl leave then perhaps the editors would change?
Its not worse now than it's ever been in the past. Get the fuck over it
easy way for the 'government' to drastically cut down on internet trolling: stop funding it.
or didyou think that operation mockingbird was a one-time deal?
If you care that much, install Stylish and increase the text size and contrast.
I'm fine with sites regulating trolls. I'm less fine with government curtailing freedom of expression, regardless of how offensive it may be.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Think for yourself. Instead of choosing sides (externally), determine your own side (internally).
Apparently this is easier said than done.
The only reason trolls win is we give them the reaction that they are looking for. If people just ignored them more often instead of getting all bent out of shape, the trend would go away. Trolls would quickly get bored because they won't have an outlet for their frustration. Trolls are nothing more than school yard bullies that never quite grew up.
You're opening this topic up for comments? Really???
The scope of the problem isn't clear, the goal is ill-defined. What, exactly, are trolls winning?
I think the only one "winning" anything here is the author trying to sell her book by engaging in much the same inflammatory business as the trolls she purported to study.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
... is often another person's legitimate opinion. If large sites, the government, and advertisers get to determine what is "trolling", we're toast. So much for the "I may disagree with your opinion, but I will defend to the death your right to express it". The new Intarweb - 100% Politically Correct, no dissent allowed, citizen. I for one won't welcome our new anti-troll overlords.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Fucking Obama and the libtards made this happen. It wouldn't happen if the sheeple would just wake up and elect Rand Paul as king/President. THEN maybe we'd live in a utopian world where we hand out AR-15s to every baby as soon they come out of the birth canal. Gee, that'd be so sweet.
Wait, what were we talking about?
I like the suggestion that's floating around for hard-news sites to actually drop user comments. User comments for major media sites (and Huff Po for that matter) are nothing but pure unadulterated drivel. They serve no purpose to anyone BUT the trolls. Take away their candy.
Yup. A better title would be "Troll study demonstrates general population too easily offended."
But, at least as an American, we're raised to protest for change. For example, Slashdot readers got sick of the Beatles Beatles SEO guy, raised their voices, and eventually the editors came down, spoke to the lowly users and implemented change.
The best defense is a good offense: publicly identify the IP addresses and all accounts associated with the IP addresses of the most prolific abusers. Make ignoring/blocking anyone so tagged an option for users. This allows the a-holes to continue spewing crap (to support the "we support freedom of speech"), but doesn't force other people to wade through that crap in order to use the site.
The sites effected can easily find out who their top abusers are. They know what accounts generate the most complaints, and they can tell whether those are legit complaints or people trying to game the system (by reading the actual posts complained about). So, the sites can easily tag the IPs and accounts, if they cared to. They don't care to at the moment.
That's really the problem: there's no monetary incentive for them to give a damn. Make it cost them money, and a thousand interesting solutions will pop up.
A troll is still a person, and you can beat a person with a sack full of oranges.
TFA didn't target the random goatse cluttering up comment systems, but they've targeted real evil trolls harming people, obviously a reaction to Zelda William's quitting to twitter.
For me, its funny when a companies naming competition gets trolled, but targeted campaigns against innocent people are truly too much even for me.
Inflammatory comments draw more responses. It's easier to illicit an emotional reaction in a reader via such comments. Once you react emotionally you are more likely to engage with a troll.
Unfortunately unless you truly know the motivation of the other person is to piss you off you can to be sure they are trolling you. Sometimes just having a different opinion on a hot topic like climate change will label you a troll no matter what your aired views are.
On the internet a person could potentially have exposure to many thousands of times more people than they could ever hope to know and so trolls get the attention they so crave/desire.
As people we are hardwired to notice things that do not fit patterns. Social patterns, behaviour etc. In fact when we are displeased or angry we tell more people about it than when we are happy.
Don't blame so called "trolls", they will always be there.
In many ways this is an exercise in social maturity; the collective intelligence not to feed the trolls.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
This problem is already solved. It's called the "ignore user " button. Push it and you no longer see the posts from the offending troll. Troll can see your posts, but you can't see theirs. So troll has unpleasant (for a troll) experience of seeing a conversation carried on as though what he was posting simply didn't exist, because it didn't for anyone who regarded him as a troll.
If a troll is like porn, we know it when we see it, then this solution works very well. Everyone sees and ignores the troll, depriving the troll of their motivation for trolling in the first place.
The only problem we have is sites don't use the available technology.
I have been on sites where this virtually eliminated the troll problem. FO course the automated accounts that are spamming viagra require something else, but that is not what the article was complaining about. The article was complaining about civility.
I really have to wonder if there are ulterior motivations at work here. Trolls are the new "we must save our children" rallying cry, an argument designed to force people into ID ing themselves, tagging themselves as "legitimate" so they can be better tracked and monetized. I feel like these pieces are set pieces, ready to roll out as soon as their beneficiaries and creators think their might be some temporary, rising sentiment against anonymity on the web.
Current example- Robin William's daughter's recent Twitter experience.
Sure, a troll gets one off but that is all anyone will see of him.
There is no free speech without anonymity and giving it up because some asshole made someone cry is ceding my freedom to assholes. That wont' be happening.
Because we wouldn't anyone meddling with the tweets of our latest small-c celebrity (don't upset the beliebers!), or mocking human interest stories about heroic talking dogs, or critiquing instagram posts of various culinary abominations or leaving snide comments on your facebook page. Because that's the "way media is disseminated these days", and this is what generally passes for social communication and interaction, apparently.
I would normally agree that people get offended too easily, but that's only when people express their honest opinion.
Trolls are a different matter; they only do it for the lulz. Their whole purpose is to create discord. It's a pointless, unproductive waste of time, and the fact that people get jollies out of deliberately aggravating other people bespeaks of a certain level of sociopathy.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
It always comes down to insults unless you will agree that Adm. Rickover was a traitor.
"This legitimate point offends me, therefore you are a troll! Troooollllll!!!!" Dont act like this doesnt happen all the time.
http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
This problem is already solved. It's called the "ignore user " button. Push it and you no longer see the posts from the offending troll. Troll can see your posts, but you can't see theirs. So troll has unpleasant (for a troll) experience of seeing a conversation carried on as though what he was posting simply didn't exist, because it didn't for anyone who regarded him as a troll.
If a troll is like porn, we know it when we see it, then this solution works very well. Everyone sees and ignores the troll, depriving the troll of their motivation for trolling in the first place.
The only problem we have is sites don't use the available technology.
I have been on sites where this virtually eliminated the troll problem. Of course the automated accounts that are spamming viagra require something else, but that is not what the article was complaining about. The article was complaining about civility.
I really have to wonder if there are ulterior motivations at work here. Trolls are the new "we must save our children" rallying cry, an argument designed to force people into ID ing themselves, tagging themselves as "legitimate" so they can be better tracked and monetized. I feel like these pieces are set pieces, ready to roll out as soon as their beneficiaries and creators think their might be some temporary, rising sentiment against anonymity on the web.
Current example- Robin William's daughter's recent Twitter experience.
Sure, a troll gets one off but that is all anyone will see of him.
There is no free speech without anonymity and giving it up because some asshole made someone cry is ceding my freedom to assholes. That wont' be happening.
Yup. A better title would be "Troll study demonstrates general population too easily offended."
I can't believe you would say that!
The only way to defeat a troll (like the parent) is to ignore it. When you find yourself thinking "what the hell is wrong with this guy?" just let it go.
I would argue that some amount of trolling in society is necessary to keep the sanity of the society as a whole.
1. Place immature people (of any physical age) in an anonymous, no consequences environment.
2. Give them the ability to address people whom they would never have the opportunity to approach outside of a virtual environment.
3. Supply a conduit such as Twitter or Facebook or email that requires very little effort compared to writing and mailing a physical letter.
The result is completely predictable.
There have always been more art critics than successful artists. Apparently everything that anybody disagrees with online is termed "troll" now, from patent trolls to opposing views. Actual trolling is mostly harmless. It's a vaccination for online communities: They either develop an immunity or they don't. If they don't, they will succumb to worse influences. In a disembodied world of pure information, not taking every bit of information at face value is a critical survival skill.
There is a need for trolls. Otherwise people get away with garbage.
It's like they (should) learn you at school and in that fantasy book, the bible. Turn the other cheek.
I For One Welcome Our New Internet Troll Overlords!
Trolls are a different matter; they only do it for the lulz. Their whole purpose is to create discord. It's a pointless, unproductive waste of time, and the fact that people get jollies out of deliberately aggravating other people bespeaks of a certain level of sociopathy.
I'm not sure you can make any generalization about trolls. I think it would be a more interesting study if they attempted to study
why trolls exists. My guess is that alot of the trolls are infrequent. They've had a bad day, drunk, etc.. There was even
a slashdot article recently about someone being shocked that their vandalism they did when they were drunk in college was
still there 10 years later. There are also people who are using it to vent some non-politically correct opinion that they are
unable to talk about in real life and probably a few who are out to watch the world burn but my guess is that the latter category
is actually the minority not the majority. On slashdot, for instance, what percentage of the AC are probably people with
accounts that just click the "post anonymously" button because they are stating a controversial position or otherwise don't
want their nickname associated with that one particular comment.
It's a pointless, unproductive waste of time, and the fact that people get jollies out of deliberately aggravating other people bespeaks of a certain level of sociopathy.
Nonsense. The kind of amusement that comes from trolling fulfills a need. Not unlike other wastes of time. such as watching professional sports and pleasure reading, there is a gratification from being a troll. Crafting your skills and taking it to the next level fills the troll with a sense of accomplishment. There are metrics involved in this pursuit just like any other to measure the effectiveness of the troll. I won't tell you what my goals are or what results give me the most satisfaction as a successful troll but there is gratification nonetheless.
-Anonymous Troll.
Thank goodness we don't have any here, otherwise they'd jump all over this.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
But rickrolling is still OK!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/...
It's not as much a problem of trolls as it is a problem of people being incapable of simply filtering out stuff on the Internet, ignoring things selectively, closing the tab, closing the browser, moving on to some other discussion or thread, hiding/filtering/muting posts if a function so allows.
It's a much an obsessive compulsive behavior by victims to BE victims and consciously eat up that trolling and let it influence them, as it is with trolls being trolls.
I'd say trolls are natural selection, those that sooner or later learn to ignore them and become better than letting the trolling influence them, those who become desensitized, are far more valuable than those living in a hugbox.
Or just change your bookmark to http://slashdot.org/?nobeta=1.
They get to act out fantasies and have no repercussions because it's all anonymous. As long as it's anonymous people will continue to treat it like a game and go hog wild.
There is just as many trolls in real life as there is online, the only difference is that they can troll multiple communities at the same time from the comfort of their home.
Trolling is necessary evil and the last line of defense against monolithic group thinking. Humans are hard-wired to seek consensus and to avoid conflict, both are beneficial traits, but when combined can and do lead to worst kinds of groupthink. Our ideas and understanding, be it social sciences, morals and religion, or even hard sciences are only as good as out ability to question it.
For example, Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a trolling organization, but almost everyone here would agree that what they do can be categorized as "greater good".
Intolerant pricks these days have become intolerant of other peoples' opinions. It's funny that the NYT would publish this considering their left leaning stupidity. Yeah if you don't agree with us, you're a troll. Fuck that, I haven't lived all these decades to just to the party line. Don't like it? Too bad.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
This has been going on for 20 years. Perhaps more if you include Usenet news groups.
I'm not going to argue that all trolling is good, but some of it definitely is - trolling is the internet's means of self-regulation. For instance, the article mentions people harassing Zelda Williams on twitter. Does she deserve it? No, she most certainly doesn't. However, what the idiots sending her pictures on twitter don't know is that 4chan likes her (and /v/ reveres her as a goddess ever since the time she posted there), and 4chan also likes her father and his work. I would not be surprised in the slightest if those people wind up doxxed, because they've done something assholish enough to pick up the attention of the internet hate machine. That's the internet regulating itself.
The reverse is true for Jezebel - they're a website run by a company (Gawker Media) that thrives on "click-baiting" and "nerd-baiting", writing overly inflammatory articles about how much they hate men in order to get men (and the angry, militant, extremist feminist sect and tumblr SJW that are Jezebel's typical readership) to click on their articles and comment on just how stupid they are. This is how they make money. Assuming the gore flood isn't Gawker themselves trying to drum up more attention (and thus more clicks and more money), it's the internet regulating itself.
No matter what they do, there will always be internet trolls. There is nothing that can be done about them, short of going full-on 1984 and requiring surveillance cameras and ID cards to access the internet - and I'm not sure even that would stop them. There are always going to be assholes, online or offline, but they always get dealt with eventually.
... Charge to comment. Even at just a penny per comment, You could easily discourage a number of Trolls.
I don't know if it's a cause or an effect of our politically divided culture, but the bigger problem seems to be people's hyper-sensitive reactions to everything.
You can't disagree with someone spouting the conventional wisdom on many topics without screaming about race, gender, class, political orientation, etc.
Pretty much everything gets immediately turned into a "kill topic" where you're judged to be racist, homophobic, a Nazi, or some other person whose opinion and reasoned disagreement is to be suppressed, not debated.
Dealing with trolls on the internet is good practice for dealing with them in real life. Think of it at the next meeting where someone is trying to distract you from the argument you're making by going for an emotional reaction. Incivility may or may not be increasing, both on the internet and in real life, but it's better to develop the social skills to deal with it than to always be protected from it. Additionally, trolling trolls is good practice for being able to make your points in real life when encountering such obstructionism. It's called "helping them dig their own grave." Never interrupt your nemesis when they're making a mistake, and all that.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Whatever dude. There's no such thing as trolling. It's thin skinned treehuggers like you that go and complain to thier facebook "friends" that are the real problem with the internet. Grow a pair or go back to facist Nazi-Russia. And take Obama with you. We don't need him spreading any more lies and ebola to our children. And another thing, Janeway was twice the captain that Kirk ever was.
For Christs sake... stop misusing the word "Troll"
It's has a very specific meaning, but everyone uses it now as a derogatory term for anyone on the internet they disagree with. That is not what a troll is.
A Troll, very specifically, lurks, and posts to try and get you to over-react. A troll will rarely overtly offend you. Often a troll will be on your side! Egging you on, to get you to blow up at others. Sometimes a troll will simply IM you to point out other people that are deserving of your rather. A troll is an instigator, troublemaker, rabblerouser, etc...
What a troll is not, is a contrarian. I'm a contrarian, I like to argue my point. I seek out those I disagree with or subjects I feel are incorrect (Like this post!) and I argue my point. I like having people disagree with me, and like to refine my arguments. It's something I enjoy. Contrarians enjoy debate.
Trolls do not care about debate, they care about the emotional anguish of their victim. I rarely, if ever, see a real troll anymore. There used to be clubs of them all over the net, but not really anymore. You can find them on Reddit at times. A troll, for example, may be African American and go to an African American forum and argue for white supremacy. Not because he supports it, but because he knows that's what will get a reaction.
And in regards to the main point of this article... It's total BS. Argument and Debate are good things. The internet is still relatively new. People that couldn't talk before, can now. That's great. By its very nature internet debate is non-violent, which is fantastic. Let the debate continue.
True. I meant the ones that troll consistently, especially those that create special accounts just for that purpose. It's not that evident here on slashdot, but on Memedroid, for example, they're all over the place. They're not even trying to sell anything.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
If Jezebel or NYT writers receive such communications, it's because mixed in with reasonable articles, they post clickbait, articles that they know are going to be offensive to many. It's both a business strategy (it generates lots of clicks) and an in-your-face political tactic (presenting radical views as if they were mainstream). If you make lots of people angry (i.e. you "cause them emotional damage"), don't be surprised if some people express their anger. This doesn't just happen to feminist and progressive web sites, it also happens to fiscally conservative and Christian websites.
I don't see a problem here that needs fixing. These sites (on the left or right) can choose to stand up for what they believe in and/or engage in a clickbait business strategy; in that case, they have to accept that they are offending many people and people will vent their anger; or they can choose to tone it down and write in dull, rational prose and arguments; in that case, the angry responses will stop.
Oh c'mon, give us a little insight. Even a tiny bit? Is it political motivation?
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Priest Vito Cornelius: I try to serve life. And you seem to want to destroy it.
Zorg: Oh, Father. You're so wrong. Let me explain.
[Puts and empty water glass on his desk]
Zorg: Life, which you so nobly serve, comes from destruction, disorder and chaos. Now take this empty glass. Here it is: peaceful, serene, boring. But if it is destroyed
[Pushes the glass off the table. It shatter on the floor, and several small machines come out to clean it up]
Zorg: Look at all these little things! So busy now! Notice how each one is useful. A lovely ballet ensues, so full of form and color. Now, think about all those people that created them. Technicians, engineers, hundreds of people, who will be able to feed their children tonight, so those children can grow up big and strong and have little teeny children of their own, and so on and so forth. Thus, adding to the great chain of life. You see, father, by causing a little destruction, I am in fact encouraging life. In reality, you and I are in the same business.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
...feeding the trolls! Geeze people, this kind of headline is just what all those internet trolls have been waiting for. Now they'll be even more relentless!
Seriously folks, on the internet, you gots the trolls. Just look the other way.
And there's presumably a sense of gratification for serial killers too. Doesn't mean they're not mentally deficient.
Provide a common forum without restrictions by having a two-tiered forum: Serious Discussion and Peanut Gallery. How sites impliment this is optional, but it does allow for both the serious and the silly, the thinkers and the trolls. Requires quality supervision and moderation, yet here is the rub -- sites which either don't want to moderate their forums or do a really crappy job of it (Slashdot, this mirror is for you) are the ones that have the most trouble with trolling.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Is this troll on a government payroll?
TFA assumes all 'trolls' are doing so just for the "lulz"
that's certainly not the case...these articles written by tech illiterates are ruining our industry (or at least making it difficult by not covering the problem properly)
Public Relations and other media companies pay grey-hat contractors to "boost their social media presence" meaning post fake comments by fake accounts or just by having paid monkeys doing it
Disquss & the facebook.com plugin for sites both have this problem
even here on /., look at a thread about Uber, there will be many high UID comments from random-named Google+ accounts linked to /.'s system
if you're examining online "trolls" and you don't factor in sock puppets, you're missing half the problem
Thank you Dave Raggett
If people just ignored them more often instead of getting all bent out of shape, the trend would go away.
Some might, but in many cases they'll just increase the level of trolling to intolerable levels. It's like a certain "church" in the U.S. that trolls funerals, they troll whether if you feed them or not, but if they're ignored they'll just do even crazier/nastier stuff.
Broken Window Fallacy trolls...
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I feel like there is a very loose grasp of what a troll is. If an oil tanker crashes into a puppy shelter and somebody responds with "THANKS OBAMA" are they being funny or trollish? If this whole ebola outbreak is worrying people and somebody responds with "I'm not sure how this disease spreads. How does it keep spreading to doctors?" are they asking a legitimate question because they want to know, or are they being trollish? Frankly, it depends on the intent of the poster, which is not crystal clear. If something politically embarrassing comes out about a politician and people post on a news site to gloat... is that trolling? Or is it a celebration with part of your community? Am I trolling by even doing this?
The fact that all areas on the Internet are seen as a common area is part of the problem. The Internet itself is only a virtual common area where private areas can be created for a few dollars (sometimes for free). Ultimately, Trolling itself is not the problem. It's the idea that you can go anywhere on the Internet and not encounter trolling. Just like physical neighborhoods, you should make yourself aware of the places you don't want to be "after dark." If you want to be safe from the boogeymen and trolls, educate yourself. Don't go to Iraq and expect a leisurely stroll sipping cappuccinos and eating scones.
I'm a troll (not so much on Slashdot) and I don't only do it or even primarily do it for the lulz.
Not my intent either.
I've found it very useful.
That isn't really the goal of most of my trolling either.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
i can has post here?
Politics? Oh hell no. I use it as a method and I do have certain political convictions myself but my goals have nothing to do with politics. I find politics too easy of a punching bag. I only use it when I get lazy or when I know I'm dealing with a first class political junkie who has no other choice but to lash out at people who aren't exactly like them.
You're a monster, Zorg.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
Just tear down all the bridges, then the trolls have nowhere to go.... ;)
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
Some trolls are hard to ignore. There are some really malicious ones (I'm not malicious) that will do everything they can to get a reaction, including getting you fired from your job, harassing your family, creating false personas to interact with you that appear genuine for years, only to use new things they've learned against you to evoke further responses.
Such trolls are not defeated by non-reaction, they take that as a challenge.
Also, it seems you're not familiar with trolls that aren't in it for reactions either.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
The role of satire is to comfort the afflicted by afflicting the comfortable, or so Doonesbury said. Trolling does not do that. It is either cheap attention grabbing for shit and giggles, or more often, an attempt to intimidate a certain group of people into leaving the Internet.
If you disagree then explain to me the subtle social commentary of posting photoshopped pictures of Robin Williams' body to his daughter. Or bombarding a feminist website with gore, and rape porn.
The majority of trolling these days is about bullying people of opposing viewpoints into submission. They only seek their victims' attention in order to affect that.
The jester is not a psychopath. The joker is. There are trolls and there are griefers. One laughs at misfortune, the other thrives on it. There needs to be a distinction before unjust laws might be enacted under which nobody will be able to experience Natalie Portman's hot grits: that would be the real tragedy.
I do it on occasion to fulfill the need to pick a fight. Sometimes the aggression just comes surging forth and rather than go down to a bar or a club and risk life, limb, and jail time, I come on here or on other sites to troll. Not saying I'm proud of it, but getting into a rhetorical fight is almost as satisfying as getting into a physical fight. I don't care about politics or philosophy, I just focus on some guy (usually another troll) who's a little too certain for my tastes, and go at it. Then afterwards, win or lose (and I lose a LOT more than I win, but that isn't the point), I feel better and I'm able to rejoin the real world and be decent and human and polite.
I'm not saying I'm evil or sociopathic, I'm just saying I troll because sometimes a man has just gotta get into a fight. Given that, sometimes I think the trolls over on Jezebel are doing the same thing... they're not necessarily misogynistic so much as itching for a fight with their female counterparts.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Somehow I knew that this was going to be the NYT complaning about 4chan and uncivil speech coming from certain types of people and not all uncivil speech, of course. If you're at all familiar with the "social justice" crowd, you probably know that they don't believe that the rules of civility apply to them. Asking them to watch their language or to be considerate is usually denounced as attempts to "control" them and to "silence" them. Those who are the targets of their policing, the ones whom they "call out", though, are just supposed to sit there, shup up and listen while the "approved trolls" from the social justice world dress them down. This is of course understood already by many on slashdot. I saw a commenter abvove approve of trolling by followers of the flying spag monster. That's fine actually but I wonder if the commenter is also ok with trolling by the those who wish to defend christianity in vigorous manner. I rethorically wonder, that is.
"I would normally agree that people get offended too easily, but that's only when people express their honest opinion. "
It isn't just disagreeing. You may disagree with me all you want. The problem is that for a lot of people things like solar power, antinuclear, open source, and many other subjects seem to have taken the place of a religion for people.
I once had a commenter on slashdot say that they wanted to lock me in their basement and rape me. "I did reply that I was happily married and that was really not my thing".
The subject of the discussion was Solar vs Nuclear as a baseload solution!
Being a 49 year old male programer that threat was easy for me to dismiss. Had I been a 17 year old girl or boy that had been a victim of sexual assault in the past it would have been terrifying.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Society is creating these trolls. Society is sick, it's been under the effects of prohibition too long and the strain is too great.
When a machine is broken and spitting out broken bits of shit... do you hire sweepers? NO, you fix the damn machine!
Controlling trolls created by our current society is as dumb as hiring sweepers to sweep up the effects of a broken machine.
Now you know...
I mostly agree with your points, but I differ on the generalization that Trolls "care about the emotional anguish of their victim". Many trolls, and I have done it myself, are really just there to poke fun by getting a some response, I know I never wanted to cause anguish, and would always draw the line somewhere. I do think words can be violent, as not all violence is physical. If the words are expressly directed towards either a physical violent conclusion, such as "kill all ****", or even are intended to cause psychic pain, such as seems to have been the case recently with verbal assaults on people who have just lost a loved one, then the people responsible deserve opprobrium, which can only happen if, in the context of the medium, the "attacker" can be identified. I rather such people are not identified as Trolls, they may or may not be. Trolling != Violence I see a lot of hate speech out there, and you can play with words and argue that one persons hate speech is another persons "constructive criticism" but is really isn't the case.
Posting AC because of the "C" aspect in AC:
I have posted a number of times as AC, mainly as a devil's advocate, or taking an unpopular stance and defending it, even though it would strip my real account of every single karma point I ever have earned.
Crazily enough, I've been on /. long enough that yes, there are trolls, and one in every 50 posts gets an AC post attached which is pretty bad... but all and all, the replies have been fairly constructive, even though there are disagreements in how to do things.
Of course, there are third rail topics that one can't disagree with (such as the demand by the general masses for undying love for Snowden, Manning, and Ames), and mindless anti-US digs left and right, but all and all, /. is probably one of the sanest forums out there that allows user comments.
People are just becoming bigger wimps. Oh so sensitive! Somebody is really trying to push censorship here.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
APK for example... Let me invoke him...
Hosts files and Adblock Plus!
Hosts files and Adblock Plus!
That should have him trolling me for another 4 weeks.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'll take a stab and guess that you were pro nuclear.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Actually I am pro both. Solar makes a good source of opportunistic power. It is terrible as baseload. WInd is much better as a baseload replacement but it still needs backing plants using natural gas.
I support reducing carbon output by replacing coal baseload plants with nuclear and wind with natural gas backing plants, and using solar to help reducing peaking loads during daylight hours.
But what does the opinion matter? Is one side or the other of the discussion worthy of threats of physical harm?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"Their whole purpose is to create discord. It's a pointless, unproductive waste of time, and the fact that people get jollies out of deliberately aggravating other people bespeaks of a certain level of sociopathy."
Perhaps. But usually only the dumbest, ill informed people are being 'aggravated' as you call it and if some of them get a blood clot in the brain from complaining about the troll, I think of it as evolution in action.
The rest of us just had to scroll a bit if you read at -1 here because of the mycleanpc troll.
No harm done.
We didn't even get a subluxation, so Dr. Bob didn't post.
It doesn't matter what trolls do. In a print media like this, they are too easy to ignore. People need to control their reactions. What we are looking at is an attempt to censor and control who can say what. This is no different than the FCC's "seven dirty words". We needs the trolls to make the rules unenforceable. All the freedoms we have now are because of the troublemakers.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"The faster that the whole media system goes, the more trolls have a foothold to stand on. They are perfectly calibrated to exploit the way media is disseminated these days."
This is terribly clumsy, and it absolutely screams of a pretentious reach beyond grasp. Another person who should never write anything.
I'm laughing at how childish these anti-troll people are too. Only a child would allow what someone says to affect them.
Trolls? Pfft, bring 'em on, I just ignore most of them and laugh at the funny ones.
Actually I did make an error and left out pro nuclear in the list.
I am actually very fond of Open Source, Solar, and Wind as well as Nuclear.
And yes I find the right wing nuts just as annoying as the left wing nuts. If you want me to fill out the list there was the guy that when I tried to explain the benefits of bringing the US missionaries with Ebola to the US for treatment some one replied that they hoped the plane carrying them would crash on take off and kill them.
You can be pro many things but when you take to fanatic things go bad. A little bit of cost for being a nut job might just make online a better place.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Trolls are hackers of social interaction. Unlike social engineering, trolling isn't a means to an end. The artful manipulation of the social interaction to elicit a revealing reaction or to derail a discussion is a goal in itself. Trolls are social engineers without a cause, so to speak. "Why? Because we can." Sound familiar?
Fuck Beta. :)
So you say, but what about when you legitimately come up against someone who says something sincerely, that you'd assume was a troll? I was called all kind of nasty names for not being a Socialist when I recently encountered a self-proclaimed Marxist who denied Mao and Stalin were mass murderers. When I told him I absolutely thought Stalin was responsible for the Holodor and more, he called me a Nazi sympathizer.
I couldn't tell at first if he was trolling, but I later learned from a friend he was completely serious. It was like being on a different planet.
The only way to not lose is to not play.
And that's the mistake the people make: they think (and I use the term loosely - there's no actual thinking involved) the trolls matter. They think they can educate people who know full well what crap they'll shoveling. They think they can teach a lesson to someone who knows exactly how much the internet doesn't matter. They think they can somehow win.
And other people try to make a living advising them on how to do it. This entire article is, itself, nothing more than a subtle troll, trying to get people worked up over something that somebody is selling a "solution" to.
Eventually, the internet will teach people to stop being so overly sensitive about shit that doesn't matter. If nothing else, those who can't learn that lesson will all have strokes and die.
Some people who are big fans of intellectual property, and locking up of all knowledge to blackmail everybody else for it, hate Wikipedia, which teaches everyone for almost free, and lets anyone contribute. There is a lot of crap at Wikipedia, even downright incorrect things, but it's the first site I check for any information, and learn to take it with a grain of salt anyway. By the way scholarly articles or even books published a century ago have downright incorrect information in them all over the place, even if written by experts, but such is scientific published literature. You can't always believe everything you're told, in fact if you have to rely on it, you should double check and verify it first. That's one of the most important things I learned from a woman scientist She don't believe in no DOE, not statistical design of experiments. When you investigate any material, the very first thing to do is to have a control, a sample of known properties, that you send along with the batch of investigees, just to cover your ass, let alone skip or exclude any of them in a statisctical way. Even when you walk the full matrix instead of using some software to give you a set of DOE runs, so, instead of 10 combinations you do 120, which is a lot of work, you still look at your data and it's inevitably crap, almost useless, but at least you covered your butt by running a standard each time, and you ran every possible combination. There are lies, damned lies, and statistics is the superlative of all of them. I'm a fan of lots of data, even if it duplicates work, I hate and despise DOE, and conclusions drawn from it. DOE is for lazy people. Doing lab work is like prayer. And if anything strikes you with prayer in church, like the rosary, is how monotone, repetitive and boring and useless waste of time it seems to be. Instead of praying your time away in church, waste it by walking the walk on a full matrix of 100 combinations of experiments, instead of hand picking 10 of them and drawing conclusions from those 10. Even with redundancy it's hard to trust the data, and such is science, a single experiment without duplications by others, in other places, in other times, is not very trustable. Neither is published literature without verification. Another scientist told me, when reading published sicence, is to trust, but always verify. Which is like an oxymoron. But that's what I can tell wikipedia readers, or commercial encyclopedia readers, always trust, but verify.
Never underestimate the invisable hand of the troll.
Theft, rape, and murder are still with us despite millenniums worth of efforts to get rid of them...
Why would trolling be any easier to dispense with?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Of course, there are third rail topics that one can't disagree with (such as the demand by the general masses for undying love for Snowden, Manning, and Ames), and mindless anti-US digs left and right, but all and all, /. is probably one of the sanest forums out there that allows user comments.
That's a main reason I continue to come to this site after all these years. The comments are often intelligent and worth reading. Contrast that with most other sites where people just get their stupid on.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Maybe if the NYT wasn't a kneejerk checkbox All Hail Obama hamster cage lining piece of shit that it is, people wouldn't hate on it. Until then they can suck cock in hell.
Like this one? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
Laughter is one of the few things in life that is never a waste of time. You go be a "productive" little member of society until the day you die, I prefer to have fun with my life.
Or this one http://woburnferalcats.org/yah... ....
or this one http://gkimagery.files.wordpre...
That's the same argument as me walking down the street and smashing windows in with bricks, to create jobs.
No, life's job is to sustain order, by no unnecessary destruction.
why involve the moderators? if getRemoteHost were reliable (or at least had a more aggressive strategy), you could write an app in a couple days to record the relationship between hosts and posts and drop in a button to 'ignore all from this (poster)'. when it's me filtering my own content from your site, there's nothing to game and it doesn't matter if my opinion is sane or slanderous. distribute the app freely, then host a commercial service (paid for by the server) to coordinate user preferences between sites. proxies and other obstacles would still pose an interesting challenge in the form of: which records do i have to ignore while still being able to provide a valuable service.
alas, as you mentioned, it still requires a lot of financial pressure to realize a minimally useful network.
It's a pointless, unproductive waste of time, and the fact that people get jollies out of deliberately aggravating other people bespeaks of a certain level of sociopathy.
Feeling pleasure from the misfortune of others is common in humour. Being the dominant, accepted form of humour in most societies, it's the opposite of sociopathy.
Sometimes you have to act like a fanatic and stand at the very extreme of a beam, when you're trying to balance a huge counter weight, even if that's closer to the pivot point, and does not seem as extremist as you do, in this balancing act. But there are different ways of being a fanatic, and it's usually best not to resort to violence at all, but speech, or writing, as the pen is mightier than the sword, in most of the cases. Extreme nonviolence can be bad too, and one has to be balanced, or flexible even on that. For instance one could be completely unwilling to go over to Afghanistan and shoot hillbillies over there, or even to Iraq, but have absolutely no problem picking up a gun and shooting invaders, if say there were a military invasion of the US homeland by a foreign nation.
"To have a more civil society, we must destroy privacy and anonymity. Except, of course, for the wealthy and powerful."
Yeah, that mycleanpc guy does not even bother me at all, I know how to use the scroll button. And sometimes I find him funny too. After all he did invest a lot of effort trying to be funny, and annoy everybody, so I give him some credit for that, even if it gets boring after a while.
George Carlin did a gig on those 7 dirty words, way back, decades ago. He also did a gig on the bigger dick foreign policy.
The broken window fallacy describes spurring economic activity with destruction. While that is what Zorg is describing, it actually works as a means to maintain "life" with busywork jobs. It may not create any economic value overall, but it certainly allows people to thrive.
A better way to describe destruction encouraging life is through competition of resources and culling the established players every now and then. If a particular species (or whatever) is allowed to establish dominance over a resource to the exclusion of others, diversity in that arena diminishes (though diversity in other arenas may increase). Destruction changes things and allows resources to be exploited in new ways. In this way, Cornelius is also stifling life by protecting the status quo and trying to preserve the current order.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
All I am asking for is another season of Magipoka and Spice and Wolf. Do that... Then things will get better.
Trolls who enjoy tormenting others when they might not even realize they are being toyed with? Or know-it-alls who spout off useless nonsense pretending to know and/or care about the subject at hand when neither is true.
Trolling used to be prevalent in published literature too, before the Internet, for anything published under pseudonyms, just like slashdot use names, which give some degree of anonymity to the author, and loosen the boundaries of free speech, to go past those dictated by proper etiquette. Of course the trolling was a lot higher quality when more effort had to be invested into it, such as printed material. Also, of course, usually it's easy to track down who the actual author is, through the book publisher, or through the internet logs for online, but it may not be so easy for say an underground political pamphlet printed in a basement somewhere, and distributed as a flyer. By the way most pseudonym authors did not want to be fully untrackable, in a free and open society, but they wanted to open the minds or provide valuable thoughts beyond the boundaries of etiquette, to the rest of the society. And everyone needs to learn how to ignore things, or even if they read something, to think critically anyway and think for themselves. A lot of very funny things that George Carlin says are very sarcastic, and some may not seem so, such as when he says that the powers that run this country own you, they are not interested in a quality education, and the proper stance is that there is an element of truth to that, but you are not owned, at least not to the level of a freethinking slave, because you can be freethinking and also be able to move about, and be in charge of your life. The proper answer is that there are different degrees of being owned, and nobody is completely independent and free from the rest of the society, even if they wish to be so, unless they live like Yeti with caveman tools in a forest or a deserted island. I don't think anyone wants to be that independent, and not be blessed by the technology benefits provided by society. So nobody wants to be completely free and independent, but nobody wants to be a completely owned dependent being either, and in that, mind control owned by other people. Everybody likes to think for themselves freely, as an individual. Though the Borg come close to mind control ownership, but that ownership is one of equality and mutual benefit of the hive, through the hive, and often people don't mind entering totally dependent service, often in a being completely owned sense, even in thoughts handing over control to someone else to think for them, such as handing over decisions over your life to a military platoon commander, and trusting him, in that by sacrificing yourself, you both act for some common greater good, such as protecting your families back at home.
I for one welcome our troll overlords
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Attract trolls and then whine about it once they have answered your clarion call. Sounds like a plan.
dagnabbit.
Did these academics even cite the FAQ?
CNN has an article on this too
If a complete stranger offers his/her opinion in a caustic way it really doesn't affect me. Why should it? However, if a friend/family member does the same thing it does affect me. Then we can hopefully discuss the issue and agree to disagree if that's how it has to be. Big difference. If you respect the opinion of trolls enough to get all teary eyed and suicidal about it, you have WAY bigger problems. When it comes to young people dealing with this stuff, I think the way to handle it is to help them deal with the inevitable negativity rather than try to block the trolls and over-protect the little kiddies. I say this as a dad. There are bad people. Bad things happen. Learn to live with it. I'm not saying that slavery, genocide, murder, rape etc. are acceptable - you know what I mean...
http://www.acetonestudio.com
and he was not the least bit funny.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Klan rallies down Main St. are part of the price we pay for free speech. So are rude comments, trolls, etc. Just like in real life, you send the cops in to make sure it doesn't get out of control. This story probably has hundreds of useless comments. They've been modded down. That would be like the cops arresting a KKK guy or a counter-demonstrator who were about to assault somebody.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I disagree with your definition to a point...while I agree that it has gotten out of hand for those folks that use it to define those that disagree with them, the definition can be broadened to folks who like to derail topics with off topic nonsense, the typical "U Mad Bro?" responses that are just there for no reason at all and provide no constructive debate or thought. Message boards all over are full of trolls. I'm not sure why you're not seeing them, but spend a few moments on CNN. The news sites are full of trolls.
Example: Got a story about someone kidnapping a child, it takes all of 10 seconds before someone busts in with a "blame Obama quote and the entire topic is derailed.
Again, I agree with most of your description, but it's definitely evolved to a point more than your second paragraph.
Not your personal army, not Miss williams' personal army, either. Also, rules 1 and 2.
There are no lulz to be had in white knighting.
It's probably good that we are regularly reminded that the world is full of assholes, and that walled gardens are not the sum total of reality. It may be that many people are assholes simply BECAUSE they are excluded from some of these gardens-- no doubt many of those within the gardens are assholes too, just of a different type. And if you can't figure how to deal with assholes without becoming one yourself, you deserve what you get...
Nice try, but Facebook saved the world from internet trolls by implementing their commenting system on the vast majority of popular websites. I haven't seen internet trolling for years!
And as another benefit, all those years that I tried to feed Facebook false data, or give it nothing to work with are now nullified. From all those links everywhere it now knows where I live, that I am a male who should be beginning to settle down but that I still need companionship. That I like computers, charity, technology and art. Now instead of ads targeted at old people I get relevant ads (if I unblock them)
Two birds with one stone! Thanks Facebook!
To many, especially the waves of young (and often inexperienced and immature) internetters, it's someone who disagrees with you.
Is it really worth investing tax dollars when this is really dumb children or overly sensitive women crying wolf? Or maybe they deserved to be trolled for their stupid comments? Often you're so angry that you don't have any good comebacks that you want to physically hurt the so-called "troll" by making a false report. Intervention at this level is dirty and pointless. This is the sewage level of human kind.
Hit the mute/block button and stop wasting our time already!
they want to control everything. such a sad world for them...
The trouble with the anti-troll, trolls is they end up typing to themselves. Empty chat rooms empty forums and empty BBS boards and so on. The trouble with the anti-troll trolls, is they follow the "trolls" to stop them from being "trolls." Megalomaniacs are destructive their anti-troll trolls ruined newsgroups a long time ago. Also what happened to AOL, ICQ and so on the megalomaniacs were left with nobody to filter.
They're spamming this thread with nonsense because they don't want us even discussing it. Check out any thread talking about Snowden or Wikileaks--you'll find plenty of them there, lile cold fjord.
Depends on the troll...
In the bad/good old days, many of us did it for two reasons: one, to elicit responses and anguish (many of which were often hilarious), and two, to learn a bit more about the 'opposing' side, while forcing them to think harder as well (and not just rely on soundbites.) Many of the most classic trolls were witty, devastating, and sharp as a scalpel... enough so that even if you were the target, you often laughed your ass off in spite of yourself.
It was, sadly, nothing at all like the dreck you often see today.
Call it a nasty side-effect of Eternal September (the AOL/WebTV crowd) - along with the masses coming online, you wound up with their level of thinking. :(
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
By the way scholarly articles or even books published a century ago have downright incorrect information in them all over the place, even if written by experts, but such is scientific published literature.
True - though to be fair, the really old stuff was based on what they knew at the time (with the rest being based on theories and suppositions; e.g. where posited that "ether" existed in space, where we know hard vacuum exists today.)
It's still fun to read, though - anyone with sufficient knowledge on the subject and a love of the evolution of human thinking can see and appreciate how far we've come, no? For instance, I have a 2nd Edition copy of Worlds Other Than Ours, printed in 1870-something (forgot exactly which year - it's at home.) It even came with color illustrations of various planets that were known about at the time. A huge chunk of it is grossly and flat-out wrong about what our environment is like viz. the Solar System. Some of it is so far off kilter that it's funny that folks seriously thought certain things were true, but at the same time you can still see in those words the yearning to learn more, and to know more - even in a book that claimed to be authoritative on the subject.
So yeah - I wouldn't go too hard on those now long-dead folks. I just wouldn't take everything they wrote as gospel, either.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Question is, would the more proper term be "disruption"? :)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
It's easy to remove trolls. Just implement full blown input moderation. Otherwise expect it and be prepared to deal with it.
What are grits? Don't you mean her hot tits?
You know what this means? I just won the internet and it only took me 15 years!
well, people need to learn to filter all prose they ready for valid arguments and facts, then discard the rest. When this is done, it doesn't really matter what motivations the author had. The statements stand or fall on their own.
Sometimes you have to act like a fanatic and stand at the very extreme of a beam, when you're trying to balance a huge counter weight, even if that's closer to the pivot point, and does not seem as extremist as you do, in this balancing act.
Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes would be ecstatically proud of you! Also, your nick is strangely apropos in this case.
From the youtube videos I've seen most of the time his audience was laughing, and never seen them boo him. So he made a living at it somehow. In fact if I ever have lots of money, I'm gonna blow it on George Carlin's "All my stuff" DVD released after he died, and get it transcribed to VHS tapes by somebody else, kosher style. As long as I'm not messing with the DVD's it's cool. It's like with chicken, as long as somebody else has to do the killing, I'm cool with eating chicken, but if I had to do it myself, in the present world, in the city, I would opt to eat something else instead. My mother used to buy live chicken back in the old days at the city market, and bring it home and kill it and cook it. The feather cleaning part is really stinky, with hot water. And the guts that get tossed are disgusting. Selling live chicken at places like a farmer's market has the advantages of getting really fresh meat, and not have to sell it at too low a price because it's about to go bad. If a live chicken does not sell at the market, take it back home and let it go in the backyard, and catch it next weekend when you go the market again, and it's still fresh, without refrigeration, and it lasts a very very long time. On the west side I see Halal meats, hand slaughtering, by Arabs. So if people bought live chicken, they still don't have to kill it themselves, but bring it to the professionals who do it for a fee. And it's guaranteed kosher or halal, because it's done by someone you locally know and trust, as opposed to who knows what kind of torture sometimes people put animals through at industrialized butcher places. But you may also become attached to the chicken, and start loving it as a pet, as it's pooping the pet cage full of chicken poop on its way to the halal or kosher butcher shop, and if your life is not in enough dire straits, you might choose to be more vegetarian, and less carnivore.
I absolutely love reading old books and don't care if what they say is wrong, but I can get into their way of thinking. Just like when I observe and kibitz when strong players play Go, I learn to think like they do. I'm a monkey see monkey do kinda person. I learn by imitation, and if those people knew how to do anything right, it was how to do the thinking. But I posted that as an illustration to anyone reading anything today anywhere, just because it's written it's not set into stone, if for nothing else, because, like your case illustrates, someone comes around 100 years later, and it's the same thing all over again, wrong facts that we don't know at the present time, especially at the hot topics, at the boundaries of knowledge that we're pushing. One of the things in science is constant evolution of facts, but there is relatively little evolution in the way of thinking, in fact people 100 to 500 years ago, or even 1500-2500 years ago, might have been better at thinking scientifically than in between, or what we have today.
And by the way your style gave me a really creepy deja vu feeling, then went to read some of your comments, and it got reinforced. But I'll leave it at that. Naw, I can't help it, gotta say this: Lucky you, you got a lower Slashdot id than me. I might have got more than one back in the day, I don't remember, but just like on Ebay, I'm on like the 3rd account after I lost access to email of the previous accounts, but the very first thing I bought on it was a VLB IDE caching controller, with 4 30-pin RAM sockets on it, for my cousin's 486 computer, in like 96? I don't remember, but it was early, and ebay was barely anything, and Google did not appear until 98. So I beat you to Ebay first, for sure, because you were not old enough at that time to have a bank account or a credit card. :) There, I'll leave it at that now.
Why doesn't Slashdot auto-delete this fucking guy's account: http://slashdot.org/~Rejoice%2...
All he does is spam the same shit over and over.
Why are you co-opting the term "trolling" - which historically had only negative connotations, and referred to actions such as inciting flamewars or consistently derailing online discussions and actively counteracting efforts to get them back on track - by conflating it with the (much older) term satire, which does neither of those things at all? Those aren't "crusades"-style examples, either; that's actually what the term has meant from its inception in this context of online discussion. Another (relatively minor, given the moderation system here) example is that flood of HOSTS file BS that came through here a few months back.
Seriously, trolling already had a definition (and it doesn't even approximate yours). There's no need to redefine it. What benefit do you obtain by attempting to paint trolling as a somehow more noble or victimized than it is? Do you just get you jollies out of calling what you do "trolling" despite it having a different, well-established, and considerably more positive definition already?
Are you trying to say "Don't call those people trolls; *I* am a troll and I'm not that bad" or something like that? Fine, call them griefers - that's another relatively well-established term, for people who want to cause pain rather than merely anger or confusion - but don't then try to pretend that trolling is some noble but misunderstood practice. It's not, and there's absolutely no benefit I can see to trying to make trolling as a whole more acceptable; it will just grant the real trolls legitimacy.
Or are you just attempting to divert the discussion from the subject of what the people mentioned in TFA are doing, and the harm it causes?
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
probably a few who are out to watch the world burn
Starts humming....
Rosenbergs, H-Bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, The King And I, and The Catcher In The Rye
Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new Queen
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
Sorry there, didn't mean to get distracted from pouring petrol all over everything. It's a good day to burn down Rome.
For a simple post of name calling or offensive stuff (racism, etc.)? I agree wholeheartedly.
But when we are talking about the trolls that stalk people, ruin their relationships and families, cost them their jobs, etc., that's a totally different story.
Then why do you do it?
On topic is a lie, there is only snark.
Through snark, I gain replies.
Through replies, I gain Karma.
Through Karma, I gain Mod.
As Mod, i get the last word, which is victory.
Though victory, the boards are broken.
Trolling sets everyone free.
Depends on the circumstances of the troll. One example could be to show others the ignorance of someone.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Seems to me a "Collective force" against trolling could only be conducted through big business and corporations. I think a clearer definition of trolling needs to be established. I for one do not consider information about x company with x harmful ingredients in it is trolling...but whomever is "studying" this is sure to have defeating awareness of these types of issues top of their agenda... So who polices the troll police?
It's only a reflection on the real world, with a significant percentage of troublemakers.. Of course the 'net would reflect it..
[Puts and empty water glass on his desk]
Wouldn't an "empty water glass" be just a glass?
Back when mailing lists and discussion forums with threading and contextual reply were the standard for Internet communication, trolling was less of a problem. It is because of the flat, linear form of the blog that trolls have more power today. It is also why other forms of disruption in blogs lead to self-censorship and even to the premature end of conversation, that the blog, adopted as a standard for its business value, is actually hurting communication of the Internet.
It doesn't take a new academic study to reveal this or why. It is because of the ox being gored that the press wishes to make this much more of a mystery than it really is, and the solution comes from the past. It existed 30 years ago but was dropped by Google and Facebook because their engineers don't know how to use regular expressions :-) The solution to this is to provide more structure in conversations than the blog allows, to reintroduce some of the features of the discussion forum. These exist in Slashdot and Reddit, somewhat.
What contextual reply and sub-treading to do trolls is that they move the distraction out of the main flow of the conversation and the single out the perp. for a direct response. When uses can create a sub-thread by changing the topic line, they can tag the message with something like "Troll-Alert" and what a reader who sees the list of collapsed threads by topic lines does is to avoid the tagged sub-thread. It doesn't matter if the troll has an identity; he is hung by his own petard. His inane remark can be directly and pointed shown for what it is. This approach applies to other distractions, to change of topic and thread hijacking, Because blogs do not allow flexibility in replying, normal tendencies in conversation are blog killers. We must kill the blog to bring back useful human discourse.
This seems to me to be a first world problem. Trolls? Really? I recall back in the AOL days that there existed a button. That button had a name. The name of the button was Ignore. Get over it. Get a life. Ignore trolls.
from responding to trolls and incitement, this would be a non-issue.
A really shitty book by a really shitty psychologist that can not even manage to ask an intelligent question or provide any insight is not really news. It's just business as usual.
Why do people get suckered into having meaningless non-discussion with strangers high on outrage is a far more fascinating question.
Trolls have zero impact on people that just don't care what some anonymous stranger has to say about anything. In the real world, the context of who is saying what is as significant as what is being said.
The internet is an enormous septic tank of nonsensical emoting and projection of the contents of the collective psyche. It is not the trolls that make it un-pretty. It's what humans are that makes it un-pretty and a potentially dysfunctional waste of time and effort.
that they are "winning" ?
should not join discussions, online or offline.
Next time use a rickroll video without GEMA blocking ;).
Lumpy, this is just what we'll all do, to a troll like you (ignore you) http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
Whatever dude. There's no such thing as trolling. It's thin skinned treehuggers like you that go and complain to thier facebook "friends" that are the real problem with the internet. Grow a pair or go back to facist Nazi-Russia. And take Obama with you. We don't need him spreading any more lies and ebola to our children.
And another thing, Janeway was twice the captain that Kirk ever was.
Spoken like a true troll lol
Trolling is necessary evil and the last line of defense against monolithic group thinking. Humans are hard-wired to seek consensus and to avoid conflict, both are beneficial traits, but when combined can and do lead to worst kinds of groupthink. Our ideas and understanding, be it social sciences, morals and religion, or even hard sciences are only as good as out ability to question it.
For example, Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a trolling organization, but almost everyone here would agree that what they do can be categorized as "greater good".
I disagree that that church is a trolling organization, they are just making a statement of personal disbelief.
I do not agree. What happens is you stop working for solutions and just become a tool. Time and time again people forget that the ends do not justify the means it does is give power to those that make power and wealth to those that are talking heads and professional activists who have no incentive to solve anything. That groups egos are stroked and pockets lined by conflict not solutions.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Yet lumpy is regularly modded +5 insightful and you have NEVER been modded anything but down...
Hmmmmm.....
At that point we have a different word for them. When you harass the same person for a long period of time like you are talking about then we call them a stalker.
I wish I hadn't already posted on this thread so I could mod you up for this comment. I personally think that trolls do us a great service by exposing those among us who have deep-seated anger issues and lack intellectual honesty.
Hi APK. Hows it going?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I believe we could have an interesting conversation on this subject.
While I wish that we could just use solar for our energy needs, It is clear we do not have sufficient energy storage to pull it off as of now, but hopefully in the near future. Nuclear is not a bad option until then, but we have some major roadblocks to deal with. One of the major problems with nuclear is the current regulations that dictate what types of reactors we can build. The only type that is legal is the uranium reactor. This type creates a large amount of radioactive waste, but if other types were allowed we can simply use this waste as fuel in them, repeat process until there is very little radioactive waste left.
Then there is the problem of enrichment. As current policy stands, uranium can only be enriched to 15% U-235. In our military we can use up to 85% enrichment, this allows for a couple of major advantages. There is a much higher percentage of the fuel which is useable, so there is less radioactive waste for the amount of energy produced. Then there is large difference in how the plant itself can be designed. When using 15% fuel, the reactor must be designed to be refueled on a somewhat regular basis because the amount of usable fuel in it is so low. In the military reactors are only refueled once every 15 - 20 years, or are replaced altogether instead. This allows for a much safer design.
What evidence do we have that more people aren't just legitimately retarded?
Rampant political correctness, SJW feminism, and religion. People have always been dumb as shit. Now they just all have cell phones with internet access.
Hi Lumpy posting as ac. That's easy to do using your sockpuppets on upmods and downmods of others.
apk? wrong. Not as bad as lumpy who projects his +5's are from his sockpuppets he uses to mod himself up with.
You don't project too much, do you? Giving away your own troll modus operandi isn't too smart troll.
Ash-Fox had to "eat his words" on saying all apk's posts are downmodded here http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... hahahaha, and so do you posting ac troll posts now.
How'd it taste "eatin yer words" saying apk's always downmodded? Gosh, just like Lumpy did above too http://slashdot.org/comments.p... and his ac replies (or yours, wouldn't matter, you're both sockpuppets of one or the other of you without doubt) don't fool us for a second on that account either.
I don't really troll on Slashdot.
It's interesting how some people end up over reacting when they hear you're a troll and you just have a pleasant conversation with other people as they yell and scream.
Unlike most trolls, I don't need anonymity. I can also form long lasting relationships with people regardless of them knowing of the label too.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Calm down, all I did was greet you.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
APK always is down-modded. ALWAYS... APK loves the sewers....
More like you're wrong again since this shows clearly otherwise http://slashdot.org/comments.p... and the only way apk is always modded down is when you do the downmodding, otherwise, the link above shows you are as usual, in error.
Ya didn't greet me n' ya didn't answer a question: How'd "eatin' yer words" taste http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... ?
Yes, I did:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Looking at the post you linked, you used question marks in few places:
I still think you have a reading comprehension issue.
Your evidence was that you posted TL;DR content still... (Remember, my post was "APK does not understand this. Also, expect more TL;DR type posts from him now.")
That doesn't even sound like a common saying.
Anyway, I have now answered your questions, so we return to my comment...
Hows it going, APK?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Do tell us how your words tasted since you had to eat them http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... regarding both yourself and Lumpy by ac (or yourself no doubt) stating apk is always minus modded (when evidences shown involving you no less clearly prove otherwise when you yourself tried stating that and you were shot to pieces for it in a 40:1 ratio by apk's upmodded posts). Why are you avoiding answering that simple question? At this point it's quite obvious you and lumpy are the same person sockpuppeteering too.
You did end up eating your words though, now didn't you? Yes http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... and here too in response to your crap there too http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... and it's just "so odd" that your sockpupppet alterego Lumpy (your transparently obvious to everyone by now sockpuppet alterego on slashdot also tried to use the same tactic here saying "apk is always downmodded" by ac posts too). You're quoted in those 2 links above that point to you doing so, and contrary undeniable proof of you being torn up for your big mouth did you in in those links above too. You're too transparently stupid to live. Why are you avoiding answering how your words tasted since you had to eat them? Lmao! We know why. So do you. Go away, worm.
Forming "lasting relationships" with your sockpuppet alterego self here in Lumpy = mental masturbation is more like it.
It's interesting to see you react being called what you are (a troll and Lumpy's altergo sockpuppet) and also seeing you run from a simple question of how your words tasted since you had to eat them http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... after stating what your alterego sockpuppet Lumpy by ac posts said apk is always down moderated when contrary evidence showing you saying pretty much the same things shows clearly otherwise. You fail again, obvious sockpuppeteering troll that you are.
I don't need to sockpuppet, APK. I don't sockpuppet on Slashdot either. Feel free to report me to DICE if you feel so strongly on the matter.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
See subject: Lumpy said what you did before here (by ac posts which fools no one, or it was you doing it) and he's backing and replying to you here. Talk obvious sock puppetry on your part! Lumpy/you by ac ate their/your words on apk's upmodded posts. So have you, so cut the bullshit Ash Fox. You're so transparently obvious it's not funny. You ate your words on it when you replied to what you did there http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... and the same happened on DNS issues that hosts fix (redirect security ones) http://news.slashdot.org/comme... or was that not you also, chump? Yes, it was. Face facts: You're a done zero in computing "ne'er-do-well". You wish you were apk.
Where's proof of who you're replying to IS 'apk'. Produce it or be seen halluncinating again on your part.
You're posting from his account!
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I have no idea what you're even saying any more. by Ash-Fox (726320) on Tuesday August 19, 2014 @02:47PM (#47705463)
FTFY: I have no idea what to say anymore since I use sockpuppets and avoid points I can't disprove after trolling them like the asshole I am.
(Run Forrest... run! Your "TL:DR" crap this started on, regarding you, troll http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... ?
It's weak - just like you! See subject - Mere evasions of a troll, nothing more and as usual for you)
Are you fooling anyone but yourself? No.
Ok. I agree on the subject + You can't prove apk's points wrong on hosts http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... . You fail.
Yet you can read & no you didn't if you used "TL:DR" not disproving apk's points here http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... so you fail (or you are an illiterate ignoramus - take your pick).
I don't see 'apk' on the post you replied to as the account name used. You're hallucinating as was said of you.
Non-sense, everyone knows that "Anonymous Coward" is always APK. by Ash-Fox (726320) on Thursday August 21, 2014 @06:26AM (#47718947)
You not only need to learn to read, but to spell also. That'd be impossible for apk to be every ac also.
Finally: Next time you use "TL:DR" as an evasive "out" in a conversation like you did regarding apk's post on hosts here http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... instead of disproving their points (which you can't obviously) troll?
Don't get roped into a long exchange like this one where you've proven you can read LONG amounts of material as you have in this debate you've just lost badly. It proves your "TL:DR" evasion is just that. Evasion that trolls use. Like you.
On DNS issues vs. custom hosts files on numerous points you had to concede -> http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... on excess power, cpu cycles, memory, I/O that DNS consumes more than hosts files do, security vulnerabilities it has that hosts files fix, and that your "fix" against dns redirect poisoning DOUBLES your overheads (using TCP vs. UDP the default).
* :)
(Along with the fact you can't show ANYONE ANYTHING you've ever done in the art & science of computing... especially in comparison to myself)
APK
P.S.=> What was even more "priceless" was your "I was pretending" garbage here too -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... where I pointed out fastflux, & dynamic DNS utilizing botnets abusing DNS servers taking advantage of their VERY NATURE to do exploits on users - so the ONLY thing you are "pretending" on, is that you are PRETENDING to know a damn thing about computing, lol & that ALL proves it... apk