Or do they always just keep saying, “what, troll? Poor little me? I was just really curious about [blatantly provocative topic]”?
In so many words? AKA, “I’m a troll and I’m posting just to get a reaction for my own juvenile emotional reasons!” Not often. Some of them do come close, though: “Look at all of you twitch when I yank your chain with a provocative statement, ha ha!” or similar. The whole point of their act is to feel superior over the people they’re manipulating, and eventually a lot of them can’t resist the urge to make a declaration of that nature.
The more sophisticated (and less common) trolls are able to control themselves, and continue to bat their eyes innocently, as you say. Not naming names or anything.
I don’t know if any of the ones around here have admitted it, but yes, I’ve seen the occasional troll elsewhere who fesses up when caught. The problem is that usually denying it causes more frustration and drama, and that’s what the whole point was for them in the first place.
You’ll usually only get them to admit it when it can be more fun that way for some reason, or long after the game has been abandoned.
Usually the admissions are more along the lines of ‘I like seeing all you losers freak out’ or ‘it’s fun when people overreact to me.’ It’s not a direct admission that they see themselves as trolls, but it’s an admission that they’re provoking people because they enjoy the outrage.
I offered this explanation of troll psychology a few weeks ago.
By the way, the New York Times recently discovered trolling. To which a lot of people felt the urge to say, “LOL, noob,” but it’s a fairly interesting article about the more extreme sort (who probably didn’t need the attention).
Interesting. I was curious about how the web compared to Usenet, where it’s effectively impossible to ban people. Had to stop reading alt.tv.game-shows because the idiots flooded the group with so much crap, all the real posters left.
The SDMB has had at least one troll who, for whatever reason, realized the error of his ways, learned that the SDMB was pretty cool, and 'fessed up to being a troll. The fellow I have in mind changed his username, participated intelligently, even attended a Dopefest. Then he returned to his trollish ways and was banned.
Sad case, really.
I read that a couple of weeks ago. It was fascinating and very disturbing in places.
Do you mean Silo?
Well, I wasn’t going to mention any names, but yeah.
I need to take a shower after reading that. What a perfectly horrible bunch of small minded creeps.
On the SDMB, we seldom get confessions: we warn 'em, then we ban 'em, and then we either (a) don’t hear from them again or (b) ban their later attempts at socks.
I love the Google ad currently at the bottom of this page:
Has anyone ever come back after their banning for any reason (not necessarily just trollish behavior) not as a sock, say after believably expressing contrition and purpose of amendment?
Sure. We’ve had at least two who have been re-instated after being banned and who’ve managed, thus far, to retain their membership. (Of course, we’ve also had others who’ve been let back in and been banned again later on because their old problems eventually resurfaced.)
Weird. Like the NYTimes article Risha cited above makes clear, these people have real problems. I never realized they’re so neurotic.
Yeah. Seems as though the concept of “lulz” is being redefined as laughter at other’s real pain. There’s a line between (say) poking fun at some clueless net newbie and inflicting mental cruelty on the parents of a dead kid. And apparently some people want to erase that line and call it progress, or free speech, or whatever, as long as they can get their rocks off doing it or imagining it being done.
A couple of those people are profoundly sick and twisted. We’ve had some major league dicks here, but even if the issues are similar, I think you’d be hard-pressed to think of many instances of the kind of aggressive, disgusting stuff detailed in that article.
Well, if the New York Times has picked up on a trend, that means it’s definitely about to die out. 
In this case, wouldn’t that be nice.