Although today our little on-line community tends to think of a ‘troll’ in the eating-billy-goats-under-the-bridge sense, ‘troll’ in the original Usenet usage was a verb. ‘To troll’ meant to post an intentionally inflamatory message to raise hackles and tempers among the other users. Think of it in terms of the fishing imagery - you trail your bait behind the boat and wait to see what bites - trolling.
In my day (insert sound of wheezing breath and creaking bones) a troll wasn’t the person posting, but the message itself. A person who trolled was a troller. Now we’ve transfered the concept over to the unrelated, though identically spelled word. Not a huge mental leap, to be sure. There’s something satisfying about imagining your favorite hateful poster sitting under a bridge gnawing old goat bones.
Anyway, go back to the original source for the term and the meaning and usage of ‘troll’ should become clear.
I think the label is overused. We shouldn’t have to resort to name-calling when a person writes a few annoying or off-the-mark posts.
I’d prefer to see the person’s actions criticized, not the person himself. Some people have been called “trolls” on this board when they really didn’t deserve the label, in my opinion.
WAG about the link between really bad spelling, grammer, and punctuation and being a troll:
I’ve noticed that some of the worst examples of trollism (no names listed here) do come off as illeterate. I think it’s because they bang out their posts without proofreading.
When you check your own work for spelling and grammer errors, sometimes you find errors in your ideas and attitude, also.
At least, that’s the case with me. I’ve changed entire posts, or even deleted a post, after I read it over before hitting “send”.
Also, if your goal is to piss people off, why bother with correct English usage?
There are also anti-trolls. That’s when a perfectly reasonable or well-intentioned post is interpreted as a troll. This happens all the time at Slashdot. Someone posts a message saying that Linux is very painful for ordinary people to use, and it’s interpreted as a troll. Well it’s not necessarily, because it’s reasonable and well-intentioned, it’s just that Slashdotters have really thin skins. It’s so “hip” to play spot-the-troll nowadays, people are spotting it everywhere, and in plenty of places it doesn’t apply.
More trolling info:
YHBT. YHL. = “You have been trolled. You have been lost.”
Trolling is a fine art - one I don’t necessarily agree with, but there’s well done trolls, and ignorant trolls. A great troll will have a clue that it’s a troll. Kibo’s trolls are amusing, but I think Ted Frank (unless I misremember) is the usenet personality usually most associated with trolling. As an example of a good troll, I remember Kibo’s trolling of alt.fan.seaquest - once saying that Seaquest would be rereleased on the Sci-Fi network with Shatner digitally inserted to take the place of Roy Schnieder. A few people bought it. SO you see there’s a difference between that sort of thing, and going into alt.fan.seaquest and saying “You people are all dorcs - Seaquest sucks!!!”
Also, I know the snopes site has some trolls on it among the files - to snag the unwary. That’s because having a site filled with purely true information can subject snopes to lawsuits from reasearchers using it as a reference.
(That was a troll. Like I said, I don’t like trolls that much. They really waste bandwidth, just for some cheap laughs at those who don’t know about trolling.)
Seal, I was just ribbin’ you. It just struck me as funny the one word you misspelled. (I suppose I should have included a " ;)".) Lord knows, I’ve had more than a few blunders make it through.
I’ve never noticed a problem with your spelling or grammer (before). Also, I agree with your post. More than once, I’ve written a response, and then canceled it after rereading it. Sometimes things just seem like they would make sense until you see them actually written out.
I agree that the troll label is overused. When I find a poster who borders on trollish behavior, I try to warn them that the could be labeled one if they keep it up, rather than just saying “TROLL!”. It very rarely works, but it does sometimes, and then I’m happy.
