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."

Comments

This is a really dismal judgement!

[BenFenner]

This judgement is really dismal. I'd like to see what the handful of scholars have to say when studying users interaction with the shitty Slashdot Beta site. They could study the user's extreme boredom as this user waits for the shitty Beta site's page and all its shitty JavaScript and CSS crap to initially load. Then they could capture the trillionth of a second when the person notices that it's the shitty Beta site rather than the Classic site, and the person's anger starts to grow. The photos would progressively show the anger turning into madness, and then finally utter and complete disappointment and despair once the shitty Beta site has finally loaded. The photos could also capture the formation and flow of the very first of many teardrops to cascade down this poor victim's cheeks as the user struggles in vain to read the stories' small text with poor contrast. These trillions upon trillions of frames of total anguish could be examined in excruciating detail, so the awful nature of the Slashdot Beta site could be truly comprehended.

If they disagree you're a troll

[Virtucon]

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.