Okay, maybe they aren’t all trolling threads. But overall it’s an outstanding body of work. And these are only about half of the threads he’s started recently.
(I realize that I may be the only person interested in an omnibus troll thread in the Pit. Hell, even I feel pretty half-hearted about the whole thing.)
There’s a certain kind of trolling that is indistinguishable from mental illness. And I don’t mean just that you cannot tell intent from the posts. I mean that if you actually got an honest interview with the poster, even if they subjectively thought they were a mentally balanced person trolling as a lark, in actuality they would have some kind of diagnosable mental illness.
I’m much less troubled by “trolls” who are obvious. It’s the trolls who make an effort to hide below the radar and just selectively stir shit up or profess some insincere bullshit for fun that I think are annoying, since part of the value of the board is interacting with posters’ actual beliefs.
(= .75) I think that’s an excellent metric in general. It should appear next to one’s post count. (And why not–they should call it the John Mace quotient, because you’re the first to apply it, at least IME.)
If you click on the Nice Guys thread, you get a twofer. GlowingD’s cluelessness and CCitizen, who (despite being repeatedly told it’s bullshit) keeps stating variations of:
