a court with no jester is destined to become pompous and corrupt.

Also, a couple of French TV show hosts pulled the same trick with physics instead of postmodernism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair

He was doing more than trolling though. That was an experiment to show how low their filters were set.

yeah i know. what pg said as well. still reminded me.

No, watergate was not trolling, because it was not a forum game. Watergate was a scam, it was also an accident (getting rather busted).

Trolling is a scam performed for the purposes of a humorous prank on a discussion board.

Watergate was a scam to pervert the course of democratic government.

Fair enough (hence the upvote), but I judge trolls in part by the quality of the fish they catch. Obviously with Adequacy, this becomes an interesting game. But the "Kid's a Hacker" was awash with fanboys trying to out-"get it" all over each other. At least Commie Day Care's second-level trolls were _genuine_.

HAHAHA! I know the adequacy.org one. That had me in stitches for weeks.

Thanks, fixed.

it's not clear to me that nastiness is more common at hacker forums. a certain kind is. but i've seen much nastier stuff on parenting forums (which i've been to a lot).

on parenting forums, you don't find so many jerks. when people are mean, they tend to be a bit more subtle (or passive aggressive) about it. but they make it emotional and personal, and i think that does a more effective job of actually hurting anyone.

It's really interesting the idea of being able to tag posts with a rating which describes their quality, such as "annoying" "boring" "funny" or "relevant" rather than just plus minus some points.

You should refute mistaken ideas with better ideas.

If you want to downmod, it's no big deal. But there seems to be some proportion of the audience that feels vindicated in their views just because the opposite view was downmodded. Downmodding does not make opposing positions less legitimate.

These people seem to be different than the ones who write replies. I've had multiple lengthy threads where I hardly get any mods either way while discussing, and then when I wake up the next day I have -20 karma, but no new replies.

I think karma should be used as an indicator of the quality of the post, not as a reward for groupthink.

Because nobody cares whether you agree or disagree with anything. I'm expecting the score to represent _my_ feelings about the article after I read it, not yours.

I could go down a longer list: because mob rules is a not-so-good policy for quality reading material, because if one group votes on agreement and another group votes on quality then the agreement group "drowns out" the quality group, because it takes about 2 seconds to determine whether you agree with something, whereas determining if something is worth reading takes a lot longer (and is more valuable information), etc.

Note that I upmodded you, even though I take issue with your position. That's because you asked a good question. In another world, I'd just downmod you because I thought you were mistaken and for most readers the question would never have been asked (or answered)

All those ways of insulting people are based in an ageist perspective, and one certainly can object to them.

For example, saying an asshole needs to grow up, is demeaning him by saying he is in an undesirable state (not grown up) which implies being a child is bad.

The problem is that the two axes may get confused in one's head. If I disagree with something (especially ideologies), it's often enough because I feel the opposing viewpoints are not thought out, and the post may set off the same internal growling as rudeness. Someone on your side may seem like a virtuous knight as you watch them engage the opposition in debate; the other side may view them as an harsh aggressor.

Better to encourage people to read comments even though they've been downmodded. Ultimately voting is about the reaction people have to the comment, and trying to institute some sort of high brow rules is unlikely to work. I must admit I'll read comments that have been downmodded just to see what the controversy is - and those I agree with I try to back up.

Yeah, but where's the achievement then?

I can't downmod stories? Not that I ever have too... It's easy enough to post a comments explaining why you don't agree with a story than to downmod it.

And that's where I take my queue for comments. If I agree/ laugh/ enjoy a comment I upmod it. If I don't agree I leave it. If the guy is trolling I downmod it.

I'm sorry to inform you but you don't get to keep your color if your karma drops below 250... although it is saved and it pops back when your karma passes 250 again. (already did the experiment :) )

any publicity is good publicity

Isn't discussion and reason why we are here?

thanks for helping me think.

I hope that my opinion about trolls is worthwhile, and hopefully will be corrected if it's not. What I observed, but didn't hear directly stated: trolls feel threatened. For whatever reason, unfamiliarity sends some folks into a state of neurosis, an upsetting of their equilibrium.

I think of a troll partly in the case of the Three Billy Goats sense: the troll is an owner of a critical pathway. He collects tolls (tribute) a/or has a reputation to uphold in performing his daily routine. He is defining and defending the status quo. If he sees that you wish to build a new alternative (bridge), this threatens his current monopoly. Instead of scaling his current operations and building new bridges, outsourcing the admin of them, and franchising the operation, he wants NO NEW BRIDGES. Perhaps he inherited his power, or wrested it away in a primitive sense. Any evolution of methods that doesn't go the way he likes, he will thwart, dismiss, or destroy. Perhaps it's bullying, not to defend the troll, but to see things from his perspective: he was bullied, and overcame bullies to get where he is now. All he sees are threats and he doesn't want to play any new games. If you owned the phone lines, perhaps you're seeing wireless that way.

To return to your point: trolls aren't interested in learning new things about stuff outside their field. They aren't nomadic like the goats, so they see goats as merely trespassers, competitors, or as victims. Not as neighbors, partners, or customers. That would take a more open mind.

Part of rudeness is not knowing how really rude one is; the other part is not caring. Back to the old joke of when the punk is asked "are you ignorant or apathetic ?" he replies "I don't know and I don't care !" Perhaps it's natural that trolls see life as a zero-sum competition.

The only problem is such a system will tend to award popular ideas (or humor) as opposed to unique, albeit possibly controversial ideas. When I go digging into the comments I generally look for two things... a large thread of comments and particular users whose opinions I regard. These are not necessarily, although they often are, the posts with the highest points. Occasionally I find gems near the bottom.

Count me in the people that don't agree as well. I used one of my very few down-mods on you, pg! Seemed appropriate given your comment. I very rarely downmod.

The karma system should predict how good I am going to feel after consuming the media -- nothing more. The problem is that for a simple question, the solution ain't so simple. I believe there is one, and I believe we've danced around this subject long enough for those paying attention to have figured it out.

Also -- thanks for the term "karma bombing". I've been a victim in the past, now I have a cool geeky name to describe it.

The curt abruptness of hackers coupled with a tendency to mod down things that are perceived as wrong probably causes this.

I'd rather a whole parliament of disagreeable colicky horseradish farmers than one unipartisan politburo.

Wow. That is the best sentence I have ever read in a comment thread.

Arc

I think the community size bit is important (see 'monkey number'). I also wonder if that means that sites should somehow attempt to break people into smaller groups in some way in order to maintain that 'small town feel'.

losing the ability to have your posts seen.

That's how it works on this forum. I leave "showdead" on just to see what the trolls and spammers are up to.

Funny...

If you do go to Hampshire, take International Relations. Fun times.

As a New School student, I can only say... well... okay yes, you're probably right. It's great fun though. I can't imagine hating school anywhere else.

Not very many places give out diplomas, but if you want to get a job at a trolling company, you can just practice on pretty much any forum. Eventually hundreds of people will know you're a troll, giving you hundreds of references to take to a potential employer. Just make sure you don't ever accidentally post anything that actually contributes to the discussion.

devry ?

Now that gives me a business idea...

The university of troll. A website where should you supply enough bogus posts, you get posted a certificate... of course you have to pay a course fee. $100 should do it.

So apparently Paul can't keep trolling from happening on News.YC afterall.

But, as anewaccountname shows, at least the trolls here do it with style. Well played, anewaccountname.

Common sense speaks for itself. The article really isn't about stating empirical observations and citing sources. i find it to be a well-worded summary of the thought of me and probably many members of online communities.

Interesting. I wonder how Slashdot maintains a high level of commenting over time. Thanks for the tip. Perhaps I'll revisit them in 18 months...

;)

(This place is too cool at the moment!)

This thread is two days old, but I wanted to put some content in relation to the behaviour of "trolling" to my comment above. I would add being quick to judge as yet another dynamic that adds little value and can cause positive dynamics to devolve. I volunteer myself as an example in the following link:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=119120

I put forth a great deal of skepticism regarding a product and actually got a response from one of the founding members of the company. It turns out that they actually had a real product that shows a great deal of promise...

This just goes to show that sometimes being quick to judge can have drastic consequences for others. I would argue that this is a form of trolling when a great deal of skepticism mixed with anecdotal information from the past (which has nothing to do with the present as things are more mutually exclusive than we would otherwise like to believe) leads to quick karma points and increased skepticism on behalf of other members.

"I for one welcome our new overlords". Oops wait, wrong context. What I meant to say is that being quick to judge is in many ways similar to the reactionary "comedic lashing out" I was citing in the comedic trolling above and can often times lead to making yourself look foolish at no cost to nobody but yourself (as immortalized by Kent Brockman in the above opening sentence of this paragraph!).

Like the comedic attempts above, this is not something that can be easily controlled. Rather this requires restraint exercised on behalf of the author of any given comment. One thing that I feel works against this all is the fact that the anonymity of the internet often affords people to keep doing what they are doing.

The fact that I'm using my real name online (for the first time mind you) is causing me to respond more deeply to this issue and to the open (and unfair) skepticism I was voicing in another thread. Definitely a tougher thing to do...definitely worth it.

wget perhaps?

Are you sure about that? reddit hit 50k uniques about 6 months after it launched. I'd say the discourse was very similar to what it is here at that point in the game.

I don't use any social networks.

I do have my email and website (with real name) in my profile, though.

I had thought facebook would be the beginning of this, but it seems to be a flash in the pan, and too locked in to really be effective.

EDIT2: Weebly finally back online: http://myothercar.weebly.com/1/post/2007/11/a-confederacy-of...

That would indicate that people would have to become widely trustworthy and rigorous.

I wish comments remained deletable longer. My last comment is 3 hr old (and has no replies) and it has already become undeletable whereas when I made an insensitive comment, it continued to be downmodded for about 24 hr.

By "become undeletable", I mean there is no "edit" or "delete" link on the comment.

Regarding the future of communities while they grow and "technical tweaks", eBay recently adjusted its policies to improve its community quality, restricting sellers from leaving negative feedback to buyers: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/02/crowd_control.php

"...and has already categorized them using Bayesian filtering."

I think what PG called "incompetence" is really just rampant emotionalism. "Incompetence" is inaccurate because it suggests that people of all levels of experience can't happily share a forum, which I think they can. But what happens at Reddit nowadays is that anyone who posts an inane comment with a phrase like "why the fuck" will get lots of upvotes. (Case in point: Search for "fuck" in the comments for the top article at Reddit, and get: "That fucking cunt is going to get what she deserves," 15 points.)

I think in the early days of Reddit, the fact that everything including comments could be voted on was intimidating to trolls, so they were kept at bay. But some time later every primal scream was rewarded, and trolls started posting in droves.

It never helped that a really low-scoring post with a high-scoring rejoinder tended to be highly ranked. That's just begging for the sort of you-got-served culture that excites trolls.

Ever thought about doing a controlled experiment about it? I.e.: showing high points for a post to half the users, and low points to the other half.

PG's essays are getting shorter. I like that -- no matter what Steve Yegge says. (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-...)

The simplest troll test. A troll (person or point of view) is incapable of introspection. This does not mean that trolls won't try to introspect, just that they cannot succeed at it. This can also be used to show why trolls have trouble with recursion and irony.

I'm not convinced that you'll be able to deal with the Eternal September problem. It's all well and good that anti-trolling is built into the rules, but as more and more people join less and less of them will have read the rules.

Forums used to be the province of the technorati. Not no more they ain't.

Not necessarily.

Spam filters routinely filter out emails based on a common set of words that are used without understanding the subject matter. For example, if an email contains the words viagara and store, the probability of that email being spam go up tremendously. Paul's "A plan for Spam" essay explains a lot more. And, from what I understand, Bayesian filtering is at the root of most spam blockers out there.

I'd be willing to wager that Bayesian filtering would be pretty powerful in filtering out trolls on social sites, as well. For example, if a post contains the words "asshole" and "fucktard" the probability of that post coming from a troll goes up exponentially.

If you trained a Bayesian filter, or spam algorithm well enough, it should be able to flag trollish posts fairly easily.

I think the hardest problem with that approach would be avoiding a false-positive of detecting people who hold controversial opinions as trolls.

The moderation graph between users and comments would be really interesting. There's a lot of information in there to be mined.

There is no automatic 100% defense against any tactic.

Hagakure.

False. People have impunity in their car. They holler things out the window they would never say to your face because they would receive a right cross in the snout. Your assertion that you would swear at me if I were running around with a sharp katana fails the common sense test in a big way.

Speaking of incompetence, there is a third type of troll. These trolls manner of speaking is seen as hostile by those who come from a more genteel social milieu. For example, in person as on the internet, they might tell you to STFU, or use words like shitpump, yet be trying to make a point in a friendly and helpful (perhaps playful) way. You need not be an egghead to be abrupt. For an insight into this social milieu, see an episode of Trailer Park Boys. People need to learn to function differently on a forum, because it is a different social environment.

The quality which we are looking at is that of unassailable power. That's what makes people behave in an assertive an non-compliant way.

Cars give people that, guns give people that, web skills give people that.

"The sites's guidelines explicitly ask people not to say things they wouldn't say face to face."

Interesting, I know quite a few people that would in fact all but troll in person, to your face.

Although in their case, its more to do with them having no outbound tact filter: http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html

Self-righteousness is often misplaced and is very unbecoming.

...as of yet. I won't rest easy until Hacker News has 10 million visitors a day and the comments and stories still work out. Which I doubt they will with that many users.

I agree and I like that line a lot. I moved to the US, from a Eastern European country, as I was fed up with the retards that had taken over my country, and ruin it down. Unfortunately, who screams the loudest, often wins.

People who tend to like pg's line of thinking also tend to migrate from Reddit to here... so in Reddit remain the people who mostly disagree with pg.

Programming.reddit is still mostly OK.

One of the main contributing factors to the abundance of trolling on forums is indeed that text is a much less expressive medium than face-to-face communication, meaning that you very often end up trapped into voicing your opinion in a trollish manner due to just carelessly throwing your initial thoughts into the text box.

You can give up, though, and perpetrate the crapstorm, or you can remind yourself that being good at communicating your ideas and opinions is an important part of being a well-rounded hacker; then you can view the posting of only coherent and non-inflammatory replies on fora as practice for when you'll have to communicate about programs you are writing.

For those who aren't gun nuts, the parable goes: Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed lamb prepared to contest the vote. Here is a good example of a reasonable point poorly made. Seems off topic because not all the premises are stated, but in his meatspace, everybody can fill in the blanks with common knowledge. Also, in his world, everybody uses small, old, anglo-saxon words to add poetry to their speech, he may not realize (or care) that it offends some delicate sensibilities. This is the graffitti of which PG spoke. And surprisingly, it is art. Not art in the beautiful sense, but art in the message sense. Imagine yourself in China and you wrote on the wall "Fuck Tiananmen". This is not pretty, but it is not spam.

PG misses an important perspective, cyberbullies!

People who bully other people because they have better computer knowledge, mainly the two areas of administration and programming

The thing is learning, working ... are both hard, and many ppl got screwed or unlucky over their lives, they either learned useless crap at school or university, or work at non interesting jobs with bad bosses or collegues

And sometimes, we are humans, we are attracked to certain aspects of what we try to learn to escape, or trying to improve upon our bad lack

And sometimes the cyberbullies call us trolls. It's okay, thought, better be a troll than a bully, the thing is, in time we will learn, and on that road we will have fun, and, the road will not end, and it will meet plenty of bullies, and overtime we will learn to be quiet, for the next person we talk to, and dare to show to them that we don't know, might just be, the next bully ... who will accuse me of being troll ... or that other word incompetent.

But the bully don't see, just like the one in the school yard, its just a school yard, don't take yourself too seriously, its just a forum or irc!

I am reading chatting and enjoying my time, until you came and changed the game, ... thou shall not speak! and now the book seller might have won, for you know, thought can't do teach! And most of the blogs I read were just trolls!

I just want to point out an issue with a small point Paul brings up, and that issue is how Karma works on YC versus Reddit.

I'm not saying one is better than the other, but there is a tradeoff. On Reddit, you can be rude, and people can downmod you, and it doesn't matter once the post sinks. Here, if you act like an asshole, you get downmodded, and your karma suffers. But even if you make a well reasoned, but controversial comment, you often do still get downmodded because of your unpopular views.

Not that I comment here often, but I'm at four down from seven at one point, and it's really the logical consequence of such a system. It seems to work here, but I do wonder, as Paul expresses near the end of his article here, does this technique scale?

On your final comment, it's a pretty universal truth that every community will eventually find a common enemy. It's part of feeling like you're part of something.

It's been a while since I've been on slashdot, but back then their system was quite sophisticated. You could not always vote on stories, only when temporary moderator status was assigned to you by a random process. Additionally, sometimes you would be assigned meta-moderator status and get to vote on the quality of moderators ratings. Those meta-moderations would in turn influence the likelihood of the rated moderators to become moderators again in the future. Also, they have categories for the votes ("funny", "insightful", "troll", ...).

pfft, you're just bitter about the way arc was recieved

I suspect that this article is a direct consequence of Arc's sceptical reception on Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit.

I think this might be the exact kind of situation that an advanced http://phoenomi.com/2008/02/13/the-rise-of-social-governance... system could solve.

Creating more selective communities with stricter guidelines seems to be the wrong approach to dealing with trolls, especially based on the scenario pg lays out. As pg says, the larger a community grows, the easier it is for trolls to be accepted and the harder it is to mod (prune) the community. It seems that critical mass is just when the pruning community becomes smaller than the trolling community, and that by creating new communities with more stringent rules, you are just delaying the date (hopefully indefinitely) when trolls come in. I understand that the yc community is special, but even the comments here show that it won't work for much longer as the community grows beyond yc. To answer the question of "Will it scale?", I think its already a no.

If you've ever hung out with a lot of girls (from a guy's perspective), you can beging to understand the trolling community. 1 on 1 with a girl and you can get intellectual conversation, but the minute 3 or 4 girls get together, they start talking about clothes, guys, dramas, and all other stuff that just isn't interesting. I bet girls see it the same with guys too (5 guys together = WoW, DOTA, girls or crude jokes).

Solutions? Keep it small. This fails to keep in line with the existing goals of news.yc (advertising for existing startups, attracting smart people, etc). Another solution? Maybe try to preserve the small community feel as the site gets bigger. One way to do this would be to use user upvotes and downvotes as community boundaries for each user - ie: making their community presence only to those who rate them up, and to make their personal community those who they rate up. This is speculative at best, though.

Another model for keeping out trolls is Metafilter's. They require a $5 donation when an account is created, and kick out assholes. Of course, this keeps out a whole lot more than trolls. It's certainly the wrong way to do it for most sites, but it works for them, and perhaps for others.

Perhaps the reason that people troll (or take part in any sort of asshole behavior, really) is that they don't have anything better to do. Hear me out.

Hacker News is a "forum" whose main purpose is getting people to talk about/think about/post links to information related to startups. It has a very explicit purpose and to this end I would not expect it to be "infested" to the extent of a lot of other forums.

For instance, would we expect to see a lot of trolls on a forum devoted to advanced topics in theoretical math? "Orbifold cohomology is so much better than Hopfschild cohomology!" No. No, we wouldn't. A serious, well-defined, topic begets serious discussion.

This is the real problem with reddit, digg, etc. - there's no clear GOAL. Like, there's no -reason- that people shouldn't be assholes. What are they getting in the way of?

It's like if you opened the doors to your house and just held a "general forum." At first, discussion would be great (it's just your friends). Later, discussion would get worse (it's your friends' friends). Eventually it would degrade into the biggest losers who have nowhere to go sitting around and making fun of all the fun they're not having out in the real world (outside the house).

I agree with pg's sentiments that the architecture/rules of hacker news make it a much more intelligent, even (gasp) friendly forum, but I also think it's the community. They keep coming back because they have active interest. They have active interest because hacker news has established as its goal the provision of things of interest.

As always, I might just be woefully naive about human nature; but things seem so simple!

Maybe this is interesting idea: http://lemurcatta.org/

... and with this post i register.

Observing just the length of this thread, my initial thought is that pg has executed quite an exceptional troll himself...

Regarding News.YC, I fear that it may eventually suffer the same fate as Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc. Trolling is a minor problem compared to self-promoting. The challenge is that there's no scarcity on the internet, so you have to create artificial scarcity. It may be that the best way to fix the problem (i.e. to create scarcity) is through fees. For example, a $1.00 (rising with demand) fee per submission would keep a lot of junk out of any discussion site. And any serious content producer or blogger wouldn't blink at the notion of a small fee. The assumption that everything should be free is what kills many of these sites.

Pretty typical paul graham post. He doesn't provide any evidence and he shows very little understanding of the problem. He doesn't even understand he is being trolled because he is wrong. No one cares about 4000 lines of macros for PLT Scheme. All of his arc hype led to some dumb macros. We listened to years of essays about how to program and what makes productive programmers only to find he takes R5RS and adds some macros. Wow. Amazing LISP revolution.

Paul you are being "trolled" because people disagree with you. You haven't seen real trolls.

I saw this on Metafilter. I am not a member but I enjoy almost daily reading on the site. I would offer than you have an unaddressed aspect in regard to those than are called trolls. Specifically Forum members who try to end a debate by labeling someone a troll. I am a member of Syracuse.com and DailyKos. I started posting maybe 7 years ago on Syracuse,com after RWers brought God to the defense an UNJUST war. I am a Catholic who marched against the Vietnam War and for black rights and anti-poverty programs. Since I started posting I have tried to distinguish between what Jesus would support in the positions of the Republicans and the Democrats. To the Right Wingers on Syracuse.com I am a troll because I call them to account concerning unjust wars, the death penalty and their continuing efforts to strangle social programs in a bathtub. On Daily Kos I am called a troll for not supporting "gay rights" or abortion. My views are consistent with my religion. Moreover when I was younger I developed a great appreciation for the Amish and Mennonites who view things in a similar manner but maybe to a greater extent and with greater consistency than the Catholics, I am civil and stay well within the site posting rules. I have had my posts and user name constantly deleted on Syracuse.com and that is fairly easily done there by any poster hitting the "Inappropriate Post" button. The modest size gay friendly community within DailyKos are very hostile to any posts that are in opposition to their goals.

i feel like fox news has moved trolling to television. its a good thing i stopped watching tv years ago

I actually like trolls of the 1st kind. You know, the practical jokers, the original trolls, the ones that have no real bad intentions but just like to be silly once in a while. The second kind, well, I just call them "people"

Give George Carlin The Asshole Theory(~):

"The amount of an asshole a person is is directly proportional to the distance they are away from you at the time you discover this fault. Someone on TV is REALLY AN ASSHOLE! Someone in the car next to you is Pretty Much of an Asshole. A guy standing next to you on line: <whispers> 'this guy's a real asshole here'"

Paul, have you considered personalising as a method of minimising trolling?

As you pointed out, people do things on forums that they wouldn't do in person. IMO, this is partly because they're hiding behind a handle and partly because their target is.

I'm not sure how you'd go about making accounts have more personality and identity, but IMO that would be considerably more effective than just instructing people to behave like they're face-to-face. They know they're not.

I'm of the opinion that if you can't explain something without being exasperated, then why are you bothering to explain it? Go do something else.

This is a fantastic post on a topic that's been a problem with the web since day one.

Very insightful. The Four Reasons feel very accurate.

Thanks, Paul!

I totally agree. Seeing that most forums are started with something stupid like 'Everyone who uses this forum are woodheads', it sets a series of replies such as 'i am NOT a woodhead!' or "I agree, you are a woodhead or you wouldn't be here'. Especially when I don't know all those shortcuts that eliminate these posts, I find it terribly disturbing to have to read through all those 'comments'. And I hope this isn't spam, please tell me if it is. I am only 11 years old.

I LOVE how the first response is a Troll comment! My only thought to add is an interaction I had recently with a programmer/hacker/entrepreneur who had made a macro program to automate mining in Eve Online. The program is explicitly contrary to the EULA and so constitutes a hack. The programmer/owner had an elaborate feedback password system, so I had to IM him directly to activate my copy of the program once I paid my fee. He was wildly rude--just throwing off flippant and rude remarks like a vagrant dog throws fleas. After the third or fourth example I started to call him on it--to his, and my great frustration. He did not like being called on his nasty tone at all and denied having one at all. I got so heated that I almost ditched the whole project, but finally calmed down enough to get the transaction done. Later I spoke to a friend in-game who had an identical experience. My point is that this article on how hackers and some programmers tend towards this behavior as a culture explains a lot. My programmer provocateur thought his nastiness was somehow normal, acceptable, and utterly justifiable on the basis of some sense of his own personal superiority. I suppose this is what happens when people take their coding/hacking acumen as a license for megalomania and a total disregard of social graces.

Great essay.

It's simple, trolls prey on people's inner asshole. It's like a form of bullying, if you rise to the bait, then you're done. There's no technical fix, there's a mentality fix. The act is as old as the hills, and they provide balance to the debate. Trolls are a form of court jester.

I am therefore pro-troll and anti troll-victim.