I think that the internet has some great aspects. It lets us meet and talk with people from all over the world, access great books and works of art that are otherwise hard to find, and gives people a chance to express themselves in unique ways.
I also think that the internet has some bad aspects. Trolls would be one thing on that list. When you encounter them, how do your emotions respond? Are you able to just brush them off? Or do they seriously rankle? What strategies do you recommend?
The “ignore them” strategy. This is straightforward: just don’t participate when they show up and don’t visit venues where they’re likely to show up. This certainly prevents them from messing with your emotions. On the other hand, there’s the thought that it means letting them win. If no one posts against, say, anti-vaccine claims, then people may end of believing it.
The “insult pacifism” strategy. Ignore insults and just keep debating the facts. But this is emotionally draining and requires lots of effort with no payoff in the end. After all, they virtually never admit to being wrong.
Depends on how invested I am in the topic. Some trolling can be hard to distinguish from willful, but otherwise pig-headed ignorance. Two ways for dealing with it are:
[ol]
[li]Understanding the psychology of the internet troll.[/li][li]Going outside and interacting with real people.[/li][/ol]
The second method does more good than the former, IMHO.
Most of them that wander in here I just ignore. If it starts the usual easily recognizable thread, I stop reading it after the first few sentences of the OP. Ignoring them is really the only way to get them to go away. If one wanders into a legitimate thread I might engage it briefly to gauge whether it can carry on an intelligent discussion, but once its trollhood becomes evident I ignore it.
It’s pretty hard to get me riled up emotionally even in person, and I think it’s darn near impossible on an anonymous message board.
I’m always amazed at the emotional impact words on a page can have on me. A love letter. Jokes. An article on some horrendous death. Someone in a thread calling my POV idiotic ( They just don’t understand…;)).
There are plenty of unpleasant jerks in real life though, they’re probably the same people who are trolls when they get home and on the internet.
As you say though it can be awfully hard to distinguish someone trolling from someone vigourously but genuinely contesting your point of view.
Personally I’ve given up arguing on the internet, especially in regards to anything involving gender, as much as I enjoy a good honest debate the insults and bad attitude from so many were affecting my real-world life and putting me in a bad mood.
I now feel happier and more content in myself, I’ll probably live longer.
I do think the jerks of this world are increasing though, both online and outside the internet (and again, they’re probably the very same people).
I occasionally lurk in obvious troll threads (some are actually kind of entertaining, especially when more sensible posters have fun with them), but rarely participate. It’s actually sort of frustrating sometimes to see people trying this “insult pacifism” that you describe, and in more extensive cases, I even begin to get annoyed at the otherwise-sensible poster for trying to “reason” beyond some point, with some of these trolls.
Marley23 and Colibri, I’ve noticed in particular, tend to do this, acting as posters and not as mods. There was a thread about a year ago, started as a comment that birther Orly Taitz and resurfaced in the news, and quickly hijacked and taken over by a rabid birther of the most pigheaded description. Marley23 attempted for way to long to reason calmly with it (I approve of using “it” as the pronoun for trolls), debunking all the troll’s mis-facts with clear facts, logic and cites. The troll, among other nonsense, pre-emptively predicted that Marley23 would eventually just ban him for politically incorrect wrong-thinking. (Logic? We don’t need no steenkin logic!) (Can you see already where this is going?)
The result was perfectly predictable. The troll got steadily loonier and more rabid, and eventually crossed the line, and Marley23 banned him. You can see the problem with the optics here: The troll predicted that, and Marley23 only ended up proving him right.
In the predictable ATMB thread, I commented on that, suggesting that once a mod engages with a debater, he should recuse himself from modding that thread, just to prevent bad optics like that. Marley23 noted at the time that he was the only mod available for that thread.
ETA: The troll promptly re-registered as a sock with a just-slightly-different username, ranted some more, and was quickly banned again.
Looking back at that birther thread again, I see many people decried Marley23 for banning the troll, as so many people were having so much fun kicking the troll around. In a later post, Marley23 defended his action as a mercy banning:
(Bold added.) And this was a good 300+ posts into the thread!
ETA:
This does seem to happen from time to time: Mods ban a troll, and sometimes even lock their threads, even while Dopers are still having their fun with them. I guess some of the mods here have a mercy streak in them. So where are they when the guy describes, with delight, his pleasure at catching flies with flypaper?
I am involved in another forum where certain topics consistently trigger vicious battles. The forum is lightly moderated so insults fly freely there. The battles have gone on for years with old veterans and some new blood getting drawn into the fray. Those threads are like a virtual Afghanistan with high emotional tolls and no winners. There is a thread that has been raging all weekend with people calling each other trolls right now.
My advice is don’t engage in these kind of internet battles. It’s just a stressful waste of time.
Remember the old Yahoo message boards, which were largely unmoderated and were described (along with lots of other boards) as “the bathroom wall of the Internet”? (Well, there WAS that time when someone posted a link to a child pornography site:eek:, and a board with 50,000 posts was taken down, but I digress.)
There was one topic that was troll-proof, and that topic was Van Halen. Yes, the rock band Van Halen. We could INVITE them and they wouldn’t show up! It was the weirdest thing.
Trolls? No. What’s worse are the people who genuinely seem to be decent people, but, for some reason or another, have formed a grudge against you so large that nothing you do changes things. I will occasionally just get randomly pissed about one such person, even though I never see anything they say anymore.
There is a troll on a news cite I frequent. The cite has a thumbs up/down feature with a sort by highest rated. Everyone gives him (her?) a thumbs down, and sets the default to sort by the highest rated. His posts end up somewhere other than the first page. Works every time. Troll-b-gone.
Troll and troll-like behavior I don’t have any patience for. I usually drop out of the conversation or just stop engaging with posters who refuse to talk in a rational manner. Just like I wouldn’t try having a protracted conversation with the town drunk or village idiot or crazy guy on the bus, I’m not going to bother with it on the Internet. I don’t find it entertaining in the least.
If by emotionally you mean making me laugh, then yes, they do.
Most trolls start out amusing. They are so far out in the weeds that it is laughable. After a while, they get somewhat boring, though, like a comic who has only one routine; after a while, you can quote what he’s gonna say next.
I had some post-stalkers on another website who didn’t seem to have anything better to do with their time; there was one in particular who, no matter what time of the day or night I posted, would show up a few minutes later and say, in so many words, “I don’t care about anything you say.”
I pointed out that if she had time to do this, she could find the time to look for a job get her and her fatherless daughter out of her parents’ basement, and also told her that if she continued doing this, I would flag all her posts as a personal attack. I did, and it stopped very quickly.
Yet another poster was banned from that website for doing the same thing, and using inflammatory language. Let’s just say that I cannot fathom how a woman can make rape jokes to another woman. :eek:
It was the weirdest thing.