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Where the Trolls Live.

Park Forest, IL
The most toxic city in the US, where 34 percent of comments are hostile. But 99 percent of those come from just two authors.
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Those two guys have to feel pretty proud.
 
SOdhner said:
Those two guys have to feel pretty proud.
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They probably are! I have my stereotypic image of who they are and what they look like, but I do wonder what the reality is. And can I presume that they know one another?
 
Hostile is good.

I'm not sure how to distinguish trolling from just expressing a strongly held position. Is the difference just someone being disingenuous or does there have to be an ulterior motive in play?
 
marplots said:
Hostile is good.

I'm not sure how to distinguish trolling from just expressing a strongly held position. Is the difference just someone being disingenuous or does there have to be an ulterior motive in play?
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Seriously? Did you miss the rape and death threats threads/discussions in threads?
 
marplots said:
Hostile is good.

I'm not sure how to distinguish trolling from just expressing a strongly held position. Is the difference just someone being disingenuous or does there have to be an ulterior motive in play?
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A person may regularly write comments to New York Times articles stating that it is perfectly normal for men to have sexual intercourse with four year old girls. A strongly held position which that person has, or maybe not, the NYT certainly doesn't know. Each time an article appears about child rape that same person expresses themselves.

What do you do? Remember that "hostile is good".
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Seriously? Did you miss the rape and death threats threads/discussions in threads?
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If trolling is going to mean rape and death threats, then I am on board. However, I get the sense that trolling has come to mean any irritating comment - annoying, not credibly dangerous.
 
William Parcher said:
A person may regularly write comments to New York Times articles stating that it is perfectly normal for men to have sexual intercourse with four year old girls. A strongly held position which that person has, or maybe not, the NYT certainly doesn't know. Each time an article appears about child rape that same person expresses themselves.

What do you do? Remember that "hostile is good".
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It drives the conversation.

If someone has the idea their child molestation is justifiable, I'd like to hear what they have to say - if for no other reason than the position seems so alien. If there were fewer market forces, and if I didn't trust NYT editors to be good custodians of what readers want, if those things weren't in play I think your point would be stronger, but I agree, there's an inbuilt nuisance element.
 
The article doesn't mention rape or death threats, but they give two token examples of "trolling".

"You are a disgusting, subhuman, painfully stupid waste of cells. You are a racist pig, a slime ball."

"Liberals are devil lovers."

Here at the ISF, those would be regarded as uncivil with the first one certainly getting a yellow card and AAH. The second may not be mod actioned depending on context. But the management here won't describe them as trolling and they don't want to even use that term. It looks like the authors regard trolling as uncivil speech or personal attacks on persons or groups. It seems unrelated to whether the poster holds their position strongly.
 
Trolling (to me) is intentionally tailoring your post to try to attract the most replies (usually by taking an extreme position on a subject), and then continuing to try to frustrate those replying by using various tactics to keep them responding.

I think (often simulating) feeling strongly about a subject, and vile language and insults, those are just a subset of "various tactics".
 
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