I’ve never deliberately trolled, but I certainly enjoy reading trainwreck threads. And, when I was younger and first discovered the joy of message boards, I may have trolled inadvertently. I used to get up on my soapbox, proclaiming stuff like, “I don’t know how anyone can allow themselves to [insert action]” or “I would never [insert action]!” Then I would get justifiably smacked down by people with more life experiences.
I think my worst message board moment was saying that I had no idea how anyone could get fat. At the time, I was 25, single and without children and had time to go to the gym every single night and was training for a marathon. I didn’t have to worry about stretching money to feed the family and could take all the time in the world to make healthy meals. Once I got married, I noticed I had to work a little harder to maintain my figure. Then I had children. Yikes. Talk about a wake-up call.
Sometimes it scares me to think of the other stupid shit I’m going to say before I know better. Then I realize that I’ll never know better about everything.
I’m not sure if this counts. We weren’t trying to piss people off, but we certainly had no interest in actually participating in whatever discussion was going on.
My cousins and I used to have a game where we’d all go to the same chat room and try to get other people in the chat room to say a certain word without saying the word ourselves. Which would often derail whatever conversation was going on and piss people off.
This is an interesting reflection. I recall a few times I’ve accidentally pissed people off for saying something thoughtlessly before thinking it through. It’s kind of funny, though, people can post the most snarky shit on this board and go unnoticed, but the one second I let my guard down and say what I think, it inevitably offends someone and then I feel guilty about it. I make a lousy troll.
Yes. I used to troll in AOL chat rooms when I was a teen, mostly by entering chats and typing a string of characters that would somehow boot anyone who was in them and didn’t have their sounds disabled. I’d also go into religious chat rooms and be an asshole, but I’ve not done either in almost ten years.
For those who know what IRC is… some friends and I used to regularly visit a trivia chat room. For some reason, the “culture” of the chatroom was to always put _away after your name (eg, johnny123_away) if you were away from the computer. Just about every ‘regular’ used did it. My friends and I went in to the chat room at some silly hour of the morning when it was virtually empty, registered all of the _away nicknames, and put “kills” on them (meaning as soon as they set their screen name to xyz_away, their connection to the server would be cut).
I didn’t do it for trolling, but I once got involved in a long and (eventually) nasty thread on the IMDB about (that fucking idiot) Burton’s remake of Charlie & the Chocolate Factory.
I’ll spare you all the details, but the other person in the thread who was most vocal ended up recruiting friends from her Quantum Leap fansite, and one of them eventually threatened me with physical harm (like, “I’ll track you down and fuck you up! You aren’t safe!” kind of talk).
He got banned and re-registered with a new name. Got banned again and re-re-registered. Got banned again. By then I had tracked them down at the QL site and referred the IMDB to that, where they had explicitly planned, in the QL forums, on swamping the IMDB thread against me.
Luckily for them, some of their own on the QL forum, and undoubtedly the IMDB’s legal staff, made them see the light and they stfu and left me alone.
I’ve told this story before, but twice when I used to post at the Smile and Act Nice boards, we had what we called the Huggy Wars. We were invaded by the Something Awful posters, who kept coming in and posting Tubgirl, Goatsec, and other stuff like that. We put up with it for about a week or so, and then finally, us mods had an idea.
That weekend, we locked up registration, registered over at Something Awful, and spammed the living shit out of them with a bunch of cutesy graphics of teddy bears and kittens and HUGGLES!!! and WE WUB JOOZ!!! We absolutely slammed them. It was about, oh, 24 hours before they called a truce. Hehehe. (We DID get a few SA posters who came over permanently)
Later on, we were invaded by another board, and did the same thing. Only THIS time, one of the posters there decided, since he couldn’t register at our board like his friends, and we had help from SA this time, he’d take out his frustrations at SA…
Yes…CI is cochlear implant
And no…the admin would be VERY VERY pro-implant and oral ONLY education.
She would claim to be very neutral about “communication choice” but as soon as a parent of a newly dx kid would post, she would be totally and completely pushing them towards CIs or oral education. She wasn’t a troll…more like a hypocrite (and maybe a paid hypocrite if my suspicions about the site are correct)
See, from what you guys are describing here, it seems like your motivations have been less sadistic and more as if you were just playing a prank. Pranks can be mean, but usually the harmless ones are pretty funny as long as you’re not the target.
I guess I’m trying to understand who I perceive to be the sadistic trolls, people who deliberately try to get a reaction from people who are mentally ill, abuse survivors, gay, etc. Like those who seem to think human suffering is hysterical.
I, and many others, would ‘provoke with facts’ a set of astrologers back on USENET. They started crossposting to groups I was in and that brought it on. The meltdowns were spectacular. Google the name Ed Wollmann sometime.
Heh, I fell afoul of Ed myself, but worse, I fell afoul of Kenny Pangborn - dunno how he ended up in alt.atheism because originally that was not his place to display his mental illness but yikes!
Yes I trolled on AOL boards, including a well-detailed persona who was nothing like me. Long boring story to anyone doesn’t know me.
I came clean after a few years. I still post with some of those people now and I think they like me better. At least some of them say they do.
That makes two of us. Also, sometimes I’ll post something that is true in general, but I’ll have a few very loud people respond with rare and random exceptions telling me I’m just trying to stir the pot for kicks and I’ll wish I’d never posted in the first place. Then I’ll lose interest.
On IRC, back when I did that kind of thing, me and my mates used to see who could get banned from a room the fastest. I remember going into a gothic room and telling them all to cheer up.
Another was going into Christian rooms and talking with my friends (male and female) about what we’re currently masturbating too and how it’s going.
Prolly the best one was the potheads channel. They didn’t care. They were so mellow, just reading their text was relaxing, so we gave up trolling that one and hung out.
Another one was we figured out if an an irc bot running an uno script was in two rooms the game would be only in one room, but you could make your moves in either room. We used to join busy channels, and park the uno game in a small private channel, then play in the busy channel and confuse the hell out of people.
One day whilst talking of tumble weeds I noticed the room bot kicked over the word weed, cause it was drug slang. So from then on my preferred way to exit that channel was “gotta go weed the garden people, be back later” followed by bot kick and some ops stuck having to explain why gardening wasn’t family friendly.
