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."
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!
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.
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'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.
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.