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Troll (slang)

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In the context of the Internet, a troll is a person who posts inflammatory messages intended to cause a disruption in discourse. The word is also often used to describe such messages.


Etymology

The contemporary use of the term first appeared on Usenet groups in the late 1980s. It is widely thought to be a diminutive of the phrase "trolling for suckers," itself derived from the sports-fishing technique of trolling, which can be compared with trawling of which it is a near homophone.

The word likely gained currency because of its conveniently apt second meaning, drawn from the "trolls" portrayed in Scandinavian folklore and children's tales, which are often ugly, obnoxious creatures bent on wickedness and mischief. The image of the troll under the bridge in the Three Billy Goats Gruff emphasizes the rootedness of the troll in a physical environment, dislike of outsiders, particularly those who intend to graze on or in his or her domain.

The troll is almost always a male figure and so may parallel the mythological figure of the witch. The use of these labels for people, as opposed to mythological characters in stories, may have its origins in the conflicts between the pagan religions and Christianity in the middle ages. People who continued to practise the "old ways" were often isolated and identified as dealing with dark forces, as "witches" - and perhaps also as "trolls".

Trolling before the Internet

The history of anonymous expression in political dissent is long and honourable. The Federalist Papers, for instance, were anonymously authored. Without the public discourse on the controversial contents of the U.S. Constitution, ratification would likely have taken much longer as individuals worked through the issues. The Declaration of Independence, however was not anonymous. If it had been unsigned, it might well have been considered "trolling" by King George III and been therefore that much less effective. In The Infrastructure of Democracy, John Perry Barlow, Joichi Ito, and other US bloggers express a very strong support for anonymous editing (though not "trolling" necessarily) as one of the basic requirements of open politics as conducted on the Internet.

Use as pejorative

As a pejorative, the term "troll" is very often a slander of opponents in heated debates, similar to a noob in online games. Both people who identify themselves as trolls and those who vehemently deny that they are trolls will use the term, demonstrating to neutral third parties that both participants are, in fact, trolls: one who admits it, and one who does not. Accordingly the view has arisen in some circles that trolls, the plural, is a valid term, but that it is not valid to refer to someone as an Internet troll on their own. In other words, it takes two to troll, and once they do, they're two trolls. However, others would say that it only takes a boat to troll (thus one person can do it) and the fish have a choice as to whether to bite or not. Then again, for some fish it is a conditioned reflex.

Vicious cycles

Often a person will post a sincere message that they are emotionally sensitive about. Skillful trolls know that an easy way to upset them is to disingenuously claim that the person is a troll. On other occasions a person may not instantly understand or fit into the social norms of a forum where most users are the same. As a result, their acting just slightly out of social norms (often unintentionally, and for legitimate reasons) garners the label "troll". Whether they actually "are" a troll depends wholly on whether one takes the political view of trolling, in which motives are not considered.

Sometimes people who are merely attempting to be funny are accused of trolling, when that is not their intent. Many trolls now find that the traditional trolling tactics are so overused and commonplace that they have to disguise their trolling to make it effective - although, quite often, the disguise merely involves accusing others of being trolls themselves.

Often the phrase "Don't feed the troll," gives trolls ammunition, replying to their posts often makes them stronger and perpetuates the argument.

Troll culture

This culture seems to have gone beyond the vague Scandinavian mythological identification and included some elements of Celtic culture, including a sort of status for the more effective poets and rhetoricians among them. The Wikipedia red faction was a notable group of this sort, employing largely Marxist rhetoric. The Anarchopedia similarly employs some anarchist rhetoric and seems to actively encourage self-identification and factional expression among trolls. To a lesser degree so has Consumerium.

The long history of trolling and the strong support for anonymous and pseudonymous discourse on the Internet, suggests that the story of the anonymous troll is only beginning. Whether there can be a "culture" consisting of people who do not know each other except through a common experience of being bounced from Internet forums is questionable, but some do claim it is possible and already occurring.

There is strong evidence for this in the existence of forums that claim to exist specifically to support trolls and trolling, to exchange troll tips, and to identify targets that other trolls might fruitfully bait or debate.

Trolling culture is best observed in trolls who do not know each other working together. Because the common methods of creating inflammatory posts are well known and a subject of jokes in many places on the Internet, it is sometimes possible for a troll to identify another troll at work. A troll trolling another troll often creates massive amounts of pretend drama between the trolls which is taken seriously by non-troll observers (especially if they take sides). The end result is that the two trolls can work together to force a conversation to go off topic or center a forum's discussion around themselves more effectively than on their own.

Wordforge

Wordforge is a board which overtly allows trolling, but only in certain fora. Users are warned of this thus affording a maximum amount of free speech. The administration allows as much trolling as possible, and thus avoid moderation and censorship in the process. Strangely, it works - according to some. According to others, it kills any chance of intellectual debate.

Trollkingdom

Trollkingdom is a board founded by self-proclaimed trolls. The founders set to reclaim the word 'troll' in the similar way to blacks who wish to reclaim the word nigger through its use. In the long run, they found encouraging trolling and flaming only trolls is a fruitless task, duals and spammers now abound.

SOLLOG

People who take the political view of trolling advocate some form of faction identification, so that biases and relevant discourses can at least be comprehended by opponents of the troll groups' political view. A good example is SOLLOG, a religious movement that encourages trolling, but makes its rationale and doctrine easily accessible to anyone interested.

Research and study: trolling as identity deception

Pre-history

Prior to DejaNews' archiving of Usenet, accounts of trolling were sketchy, there being little evidence to sort through. After that time, however, the huge archives were available for researchers. Perhaps the earliest known—although poorly documented—case is the 1982–1983 saga of AlexAndJoan from the CompuServe forums. Van Gelder, a reporter for Ms. magazine, documented the incident in 1996 in an article for his publication. Alex (in real life a 50+ very shy psychiatrist from New York) pretended to be a highly bombastic, anti-religious, post-car-accident, wheelchair-bound, mute woman named Joan "in order to better relate to his female patients". This went on for two years and "Joan" had become a hugely detailed character with an array of emotional relationships. These began to fall apart only after "Joan" coaxed an online friend of hers into an affair with Alex.

"Even those who barely knew Joan felt implicated—and somehow betrayed—by Alex's deception. Many of us on-line like to believe that we're a utopian community of the future, and Alex's experiment proved to us all that technology is no shield against deceit. We lost our innocence, if not our faith." (Van Gelder, 1996, p.534)

Trolling in the 1990s

One early reference to "troll" found in the Google Usenet archive was by user "Mark Miller," directed toward the user "Tad" on Feb. 8, 1990. [1] However, it is unclear if this instance represents a usage of "troll" as it is known today, or if it was simply a chance choice of epithet:

"You are so far beyond being able to understand anything anyone here says that this is just converging on uselessness. The really sad part is that you really believe that you're winning. You are a shocking waste of natural resources - kindly re-integrate yourself into the food-chain...you mindless flatulent troll."

The more likely derivation can be found in the phrase "trolling for newbies," popularized in the early 1990s in the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban. The usage was somewhat different from the current notion of trolling; it was a relatively gentle inside joke by veteran users presenting questions or topics that had been so overdone only a new user would respond to them earnestly. Others expanded the term to include the practice of playing a seriously misinformed or deluded user, even in newsgroups where one was not a regular; these were often attempts at humor rather than provocation. In such contexts, the noun "troll" usually referred to an act of trolling rather than to the author.

Some longtime Usenet users continued to insist on these earlier definitions even after the term was applied more generally to inflammatory actions previously characterized as "flamebait".

In serious literature the practice was first documented by Judith Donath (1999), who used several anecdotal examples from various Usenet newsgroups in her discussion. Donath's paper outlines the ambiguousness of identity in a disembodied "virtual community" [2]:

"In the physical world there is an inherent unity to the self, for the body provides a compelling and convenient definition of identity. The norm is: one body, one identity. ... The virtual world is different. It is composed of information rather than matter."

Donath provides a concise overview of identity deception games which trade on the confusion between physical and epistemic community:

"Trolling is a game about identity deception, albeit one that is played without the consent of most of the players. The troll attempts to pass as a legitimate participant, sharing the group's common interests and concerns; the newsgroups members, if they are cognizant of trolls and other identity deceptions, attempt to both distinguish real from trolling postings and, upon judging a poster a troll, make the offending poster leave the group. Their success at the former depends on how well they—and the troll—understand identity cues; their success at the latter depends on whether the troll's enjoyment is sufficiently diminished or outweighed by the costs imposed by the group.
Trolls can be costly in several ways. A troll can disrupt the discussion on a newsgroup, disseminate bad advice, and damage the feeling of trust in the newsgroup community. Furthermore, in a group that has become sensitized to trolling—where the rate of deception is high—many honestly naïve questions may be quickly rejected as trollings. This can be quite off-putting to the new user who upon venturing a first posting is immediately bombarded with angry accusations. Even if the accusation is unfounded, being branded a troll is quite damaging to one's online reputation." (Donath, 1999, p. 45)[3]

Usage

"Please do not feed the troll" images are meant to tell others not to encourage trolls by reacting to them.

Calling someone a troll makes assumptions about a writer's motives that are impossible to determine, whereas using the verb (calling a post "trolling") describes the reception of a post without making assumptions about motives. Such assumptions would generally be an example of the fundamental attribution error; i.e. inferring that behavior results from a person's nature or personality rather than examining behavior in the context of events surrounding the behavior. In other words, trolling may have more to do with context than with personality. Also, it may be possible to troll unintentionally. Regardless, both users and posts are commonly labelled as trolls when their content upsets people.

The term troll is highly subjective, and some posts will look like trolling to some while seeming like meaningful contributions to others. For example, a so-called troll may be playing Devil's advocate by stating conservative opinions in a liberal forum. Behavior which might be considered a simple rampage or an emotional outburst in other environments is often tagged with the term troll in Internet discussion.

The term is frequently used to discredit an opposing position in an argument. This can amount to an ad hominem argument; a purported troll of this nature may actually hold an insightful but controversial position that is generating controversy precisely because it has successfully challenged entrenched opinions.

Possible reasons people use more slang monikers in Internet-mediated discussion include the feeling of anonymity and impersonal perceptions of other conversants.

Regardless of the writer's motives, controversial posts are virtually guaranteed, in most online forums, to earn a corrective or patronizing or outraged response by those who do not distinguish between real physical community where people are actually exposed to some shared risk of bodily harm by their actions, and epistemic community based on a mere exchange of words and ideas. Customs of discourse, or etiquette, that originated in such physical communities are often applied naively by newcomers to the Internet who are not used to the range of views expressed online, especially anonymously.

Troll food refers to replies to the original controversial troll posts, that the trolls subsequently use as feedback to throw more fuel to the fire of their posts.

"Please do not feed the Trolls" is a warning sign that other article readers post to warn newcomers that they believe the original poster is a troll..

One virtue of the concept of "trolls" is that it reduces an abstract code of manners into an unforgettable image, that of a "troll." A reminder to users to behave courteously may not sink in (and indeed may invite users to "correct" one another's manners, provoking more conflict). A phrase like "don't feed the trolls" -- reductive as it might seem -- effectively communicates a few basic norms of Internet conduct (don't escalate, remember that some posts can be ignored) in a way that is immediately comprehensible and effective.

Trolling in different Internet media

Trolling takes distinct forms in different media; it started on newsgroups, and as the Internet has evolved, so has trolling.

  • Usenet — hierarchies of newsgroups limit trolls' exposure, but crossposting can overcome this. Some Internet service providers implement limits on the number of newsgroups a message can be crossposted to. In one notable example, alt.net instituted a crosspost limit after the trolls on the system had become so notorious that Peter da Silva instituted a campaign for other systems to cease exchanging news with alt.net until they did something about the problem.
  • Mailing lists — usually controlled by moderators, so unwanted contributors can quickly be banned.
  • SlashCode — based forums use a rating system so that readers can moderate a post up or down from its initial rating. Readers can then choose to ignore posts that others have "modded down." Timing of trolls is particularly important, since earlier posts are more likely to be read than later posts. An ideal troll would generate much heated discussion and posting without further intervention from the troll.
  • Wikis — the flat, asynchronous and open model allows anyone to post anything; users work to undo negative changes using the built-in reversion tools, but this requires hundreds of volunteers to monitor large popular sites. Trolls tend to be more subtle than in discussion groups, often posting material that could be legitimate, but will cause controversy by challenging the current power structure. Difficulty is compounded by the impossibility of discerning whether a user is simply espousing a controversial opinion, or trolling. Sometimes wikis get vandalized.
  • Weblogs — in their most common form as a personal soapbox with the ability for anybody to leave comments, popular weblogs often make effective springboards for trolls, either as inflammatory comments or provocative entries. The ease with which weblogs can be linked encourages troll propagation.
  • IRC — the open nature of most IRC channels on popular networks enables any potential troll to enter and utilise any of a range of techniques, ranging from simple crapflooding to subtly irritating remarks which trigger angry responses. The relative ease of evading bans from channels and servers and the volatile nature of many IRC users can allow trolls to perpetuate indefinitely.
  • Multiplayer first person shooters — online gaming attracts a large number of teenage males, who take advantage of the combative atmosphere and their general anonymity to disparage other players. See pwn or noob for more information. Team killing and griefing -- breaking the social rules of the game to harass other players -- can also be considered similar.
  • Online Fantasy Sports — A troll will infiltrate a free, online league with multiple teams from different identity accounts and then attempt to make lopsided trades of players to improve one team. The troll will leave numerous messages on the league bulletin board from different identities to give the appearance of legitimacy to otherwise illicit behavior. Players that object to the obvious complicity are usually showered with insults and other attempts at evasion.
  • Web Forums — Forums of all kinds will attract trolls. Their behavior does not differ much from the above examples. There is nearly no forum free of trolls except with a few exceptions of very small sites and those with exceptionally strict policies on trolling.

Examples

Common types of troll messages or activities:

One Shot Trolls

One shot troll messages are intended to be disruptive, they tend to be very obvious, to ensure that they will receive annoyed reply

  • Off topic messages — "Can anyone help me make a web page?" "No, this is a music forum."
  • Inflammatory messages — "You are an idiot for including this type of message in your list."
  • Including offensive media such as annoying sound files or disturbing pictures in a message, or linking to shock sites that contain such media. Often these links are disguised as legitimate links.
  • Posting politically sensitive images in inappropriate places
  • Deliberate and repeated misspelling of other people's nicks in order to disturb or irritate them in a conversation.
  • Messages containing an obvious flaw or error — "I think 2001: A Space Odyssey is Roman Polanski's best movie."
  • Intentionally naive or politically contentious messages — "I think George W. Bush is the best/worst President ever."
  • Deliberately revealing the ending of a recent popular movie or book, such as the latest Harry Potter novel, as a spoiler
  • Intentionally posting an outrageous argument deliberately constructed around a fundamental but obfuscated flaw or error; often the poster will become defensive when the argument is refuted but may instead continue the thread through the use of further flawed arguments; this is referred to as "feeding" the troll.
  • A subclass of the above is the flawed proof of an important unsolved mathematical problem or impossibility (e.g. 1 = 2); however these may not always be troll-posts and are sometimes at least mathematically interesting.
  • Bumping an older discussion, or rehashing a highly controversial past topic, particularly in smaller online communities.
  • After a flamewar ensues, pretending to be innocent
  • Off-topic complaints about personal life or threats of suicide; sometimes this is the "cry for help" troll.
  • Plural or paranoid answers to personal opinions expressed by individuals — "I don't believe that all of you really believe that, you are teaming against me."
  • Any combination of the above. For example, a troll will combine inflammatory statements with poor grammar and AIM-speak (which is also known as "netspeak"). "lmfao you fuctard u are so weak minded and predictablei thought i wan iggied i play ya like a card"

Other examples

Some trolls may denounce a particular religion in a religion newsgroup — though historically, this would have been called "flamebait". Like those who engage in flaming, self-proclaimed or alleged Internet trolls sometimes resort to innuendo or misdirection in the pursuit of their objectives.

A variant of the second variety (inflammatory messages) involves posting content obviously severely contradictory to the (stated or unstated) focus of the group or forum- for example, posting cat meat recipes on a pet lovers forum, posting evolutionary theory on a creationist forum (or vice versa), or posting messages about how all dragons are boring in the USENET group alt.fan.dragons.

Cross posting is a popular method of choice by Usenet trolls: a cross-posted article can be discussed simultaneously in several unrelated and/or opposing newsgroups; this is likely to result in a flame war. For instance, an anti-fast food flame bait might be cross posted to healthy eating groups, environmentalist groups, animal rights groups, as well as a totally off-topic artificial intelligence newsgroup.

An example of a successful troll is the well-known "Oh how I envy American students" USENET thread which got 3000+ followups.

A new USENET newsgroup alt.genius.bill-palmer was created by Igor Chudov for the purpose of creating an outlet for discussing a controversial USENET personality Bill Palmer, himself an alleged USENET troll who managed to make his personality the center of all discussions. A swirl of messages attempting to disprove his alleged status as genius, crossposted to hell and back, made a.g.b-p the most popular new alt.* newsgroup of the year. Its creator was nominated for Troll of the year 1996 award.

Motivation

Self-proclaimed "trolls" may style themselves as devil's advocates, gadflies or "culture jammers," challenging the dominant discourse and assumptions of forum discussions in an attempt to break the status quo of groupthink - the belief system that prevails in their absence. Wikipedia itself has a project to counter systemic bias.

Critics have claimed that genuine "devil's advocates" generally identify themselves as such out of respect for etiquette and courtesy, while trolls may dismiss etiquette and courtesy altogether.

Most discussion of what motivates Internet trolls comes from other Internet users who claim to have observed trolling behavior. There is little scholarly literature to describe either the term or the phenomenon. The comments of accused trolls might be unreliable, since they may in fact be intending to stir controversy rather than to advance understanding of the phenomenon. Likewise, accusers are often motivated by a desire to defend a particular Internet project and references to an Internet user as a troll might not be based on the actual goals of the person so named. As a result, identifying the goals of Internet trolls is most often speculative. Still, several basic goals have been attributed to Internet trolls, according to the type of disruption they are believed to be provoking.

Proposed motivations for trolling:

  • Trolling can be described as a breaching experiment, which, because of the use of an alternate persona, allows for normal social boundaries and rules of etiquette to be tested or otherwise broken, without serious consequences. This may be part of an attempt to test the limits of some discourse, or to identify reactive personalities. By removing identities and histories from the situation, leaving only the discourse, some scientists believe that it is possible to run social engineering experiments using troll methods. However, few believe that troll organizations are engaged in science, and a few scattered individuals with no particular method or thesis cannot be described as scientists. They might however be engaged in research.
  • Anonymous attention-seeking: The troll seeks to dominate the thread by inciting anger, and effectively hijacking the topic at hand.
  • Amusement: To some people, the thought of a person getting angry over statements from total strangers is entertaining.
  • Cry for help: Many so-called trolls, in their postings, indicate disturbing situations regarding family, relationships, substances, and school -- although it is generally impossible to know whether this is just simply part of the troll. Some believe that trolling is an aggressive, confrontational way by which trolls seek a sort of tough love guidance in an anonymous forum.
  • Self-proclaimed trolls and their defenders suggest that trolling is a clever way of improving discussion, or an alternative method of viewing power relations.
  • Setting oneself a challenge: simply to see if one can do it and be successful, e.g. one member of an online forum joining under an unrecognizable identifying name to see if the other members of the forum can be fooled and, if so, for how long.
  • Wasting others' time: One of the greatest themes in trolling is the idea that a troll can spend one minute of time posting a troll, causing multiple other people to waste several minutes of their time, catalytically affecting others. Most trolls enjoy the idea that they wasted others time at comparatively little effort on their behalf.
  • Domino effect: Related to amusement, but a more specific fashion: starting large chain reactions in response to one's initial post. Achieving a disproportionately large response to a small action is the general theme. This is similar to how a young child that goes missing (but is actually hiding) may act with glee, seeing a large number of people conducting a massive search in response to the supposed disappearance.
  • Effect change in user opinions: A troll may state extreme positions to make his or her actual beliefs seem moderate (this often involves sock puppeteering or duals, where the bad cop is a sock-puppet troll) or, alternatively, play the role of Devil's advocate to strengthen opposing convictions [with which he or she usually actually agrees].
  • Test the integrity of a system against social attacks or other forms of misbehavior: For example, blatantly violating terms-of-use in order to see whether any action is taken by the site administrators.
  • Overcome feelings of inferiority or powerlessness by getting the experience of controlling an environment.
  • Self-promotion.
  • Fight "groupthink": Many trolls defend their actions as shocking people out of entrenched conformism.
  • Satire: In these cases, the individuals do not think of themselves as trolls, but misunderstood humorists or political commentators.
  • Satisfaction gained from personal attacks.
  • Harassment: following a person -- who has been targetted for harassment in one forum but who has chosen to escape being victimized by moving on -- and trolling the forum in general as a means of making that new "home" an uncomfortable place to be online.
  • Lowering signal to noise ratio: On Slashdot, moderation points that could be used to moderate up alternative posts are wasted on moderating down things like ASCII pictures of the goatse man. This lowers the quality of comments at certain thresholds.
  • Anonymously testing an alternate persona.
  • Emptying a forum: this is usually only feasible if the forum is small.

It is difficult to gauge the motivations of trolls, since most of the justifications offered by alleged trolls for their behavior are nothing more than ruses concocted to continue whatever mischief they imagine themselves to have started. This is unfortunate because, as the above list supposes, there are legitimate reasons for engaging in the sort of actions for which trolling is known. Still, etiquette is simple and straightforward enough that most people can advance the aims professed by self-exculpatory trolls without actually resorting to these methods. Since there is a wide spectrum of possible motivations for trolls, some of these functions being benevolent and others, clearly malevolent, to typecast users as trolls in the negative sense is often rash.

Some users of Internet forums are considered to be "trollhunters", or "trollbaiters". They willingly enter conflict when trolls emerge. Often, trollhunters are as disruptive as trolls. A single troll-post may be ignored, but if ten trollhunters "pounce" following a troll, they will drive the thread offtopic.


Resolutions and alternatives

In general, popular wisdom advises users to avoid feeding trolls, and to ignore temptations to respond. Responding to a troll inevitably drives discussion off-topic, to the dismay of bystanders, and supplies the troll with the craved attention. When trollhunters pounce on the trolls, ignorers reply with: "YHBT. YHL. HAND.", or "You have been trolled. You have lost. Have a nice day." However, since trollhunters (like trolls) are often conflict-seekers themselves, the loss usually is not on the part of the trollhunter; rather, the losers are the other forum-users who would have preferred that the conflict not emerge at all.

Literature on conflict resolution suggests that labeling participants in Internet discussions as trolls can perpetuate the unwanted behaviors. A person rejected by a social group, both online and offline, may assume an antagonistic role toward it, and seek to further annoy or anger members of the group. The "troll" label, often a sign of social rejection, may therefore perpetuate trolling.

Better results normally ensue when users take the moderator role and describe more constructive behaviors in a non-judgmental, non-confrontational way. Trolls are excited by trollhunters and frustrated by ignorers, and neither of these emotions produce positive results for the forum. Engaging trolls results in "flame wars". Trolls frustrated by the "ignore strategy" may leave the forum (and either troll elsewhere, or become constructive users) or may become progressively more inflammatory until they get a response.

Novice trolls may experience troll's remorse, a feeling of regret after losing their account (whether it be from an Internet service provider or from a website) as a consequence of their trolling.

Usefulness of trolling

A major debate on the Internet is whether or not trolls perform any useful function. Because troll is such a broadly-applied term, if all definitions thereof are to be accepted, the answer must be definitively, "yes and no".

Users performing many useful, but controversial, functions are often decried as trolls, and in these cases, so-called trolling may actually benefit the forum in which it occurs. For example, the presence of a radical right-winger described as a troll may allow a conservative lurker to feel more comfortable expressing her viewpoints, which seem very moderate in contrast. On the other hand, if trollhunters mount a flame war against this right-wing troll, the conservative bystander may feel less comfortable expressing her views, to the detriment of the forum. As much as trolls claim to fight groupthink, they may actually encourage it by solidifying opinion against them.

Trolls may also provide a valuable service by making people question the validity of what is read both on the Internet and from other sources. Trolls show that expressing any opinion is as easy as expressing an informed and considered opinion and may get as much visibility. It is arguable that shock jocks, some newspaper columnists are trolling public opinion—on Slashdot, John C. Dvorak is often cited as an example.

Even though useful content and productive users are sometimes decried as trolls, the general consensus is that pure "trolling" benefits only the troll and trollhunters, and has no place in any forum. Most forums reject the claim that pure and intentional trolling serves any useful purpose.

Trolls can also in some circumstances be a source of genuine humour, which depends entirely upon whether the troll is a good or a bad troll. It's usually fairly easy to spot the difference between such actions: a bad troll resorts only to weak uncreative arguments whereas a good troll will create a subtle set of arguments which draw people in with cunning twists to provide a thread of non sequitur humour.

Some trolls have been known to try to troll threads into deletion and serve as a form of negative reinforcement to "newbies" and also help reduce clutter of spam threads on a large message board.

In many cases, trolling can lead to the administrator or moderators of a forum to implement features to the site to prevent trolling. Although this could be regarded as improving the website, it remains that the features would not be needed if the trolls weren't there.

Behaviorism

Precise definitions of "troll" are difficult because such definitions rely on assumptions about internal motivation, which cannot be 100% proven without reverse-engineering the details of the human mind. Some behaviors such as name-calling are obvious candidates for a "troll" classification, but often what is considered trolling is more subtle and disputable. (Name calling perhaps would fall under the classification of "flamer" instead.)

Some have suggested that rather than call somebody a "troll", to instead focus on specific behaviors that a group finds uncomfortable and enforce behavioral rules to prevent such behaviors consistently and fairly. The idea is to focus on the undesirable behavior instead of the motivation for the behavior. If such behaviors cannot be identified, then perhaps the alleged troll should be tolerated out of fairness. Some call this the, "If you cannot identify it, then tolerate it" plan.

An Alternative View

While trolls and trolling are by and large considered a negative and undesirable addition to a message board, some claim a belief that trolling is inherently bad can have damaging consequences.

The use of the word terrorist is often cited as an example of stepping over the line. Anything labeled with the word terrorist rallies feeling of an 'us versus them' mentality both helpful in ostracizing trollish behavior and strengthening the 'need' for anti-troll tactics, consolidating a webmasters support. In most cases the latter is a unexpected bonus of dealing with trolls, but what if it is the only goal? What if a webmaster wishes to silence varieties of criticism ranging from poor moderation, too much advertising, restrictions on topics of discussion? Playing the 'troll' card may be their weapon of choice.

The polarizing effect that the issue of trolling has on online communities has lead to several schisms. For example, Wordforge was created as an alternative to Trekbbs, touting itself as a general discussion board designed as a place where rules are limited so the 'troll card' cannot be played in a self-serving manner again. Such boards are very much in the minority compared to a usual board where ‘trolling = bad’ is both an accurate and useful descriptor

Many - perhaps most - people labelled "trolls" are simply being called a name by someone else in the course of a religious, political or other ordinary type of dispute. In other words they are labelled as a "troll" for acting as a dissident or heretic. To characterize systems administrators or moderators as "the troll who got there first" is not entirely inaccurate: many debates between those with and without administrative or legal powers seem simply to resemble a heated, personal, argument. On the Internet in particular, the holding of technological powers (such as the power to ban users or block IP addresses) is not necessarily a sign of any superior political or moral judgement.

As with similar pejorative labels, a group of people who are assigned the label can turn it around to create group identity and the power to collectively resist: Individual outsiders using the label on someone become targets for a collective response. Insiders may use the label without consequence, usually in a joking or disarming way.

Specific trolling subcultures

Miscellaneous

  • See Wikipedia:troll for more on the view that Wikipedia, officially, takes of trolls.

Troll Boards

Troll FAQs

Troll Sites

  • Annoy.com A professional troll who fights for freedom of speech.
  • Adequacy.org Archive of Adequacy.org, now only an archive version of a troll site

Troll Examples

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