I’m still sticking with my hypothesis. There’s just something about him that screams “fake internet persona.”
It’s possible. NoveltyBubble recently admitted to intentionally posting in such a way that they are causing controversy on purpose (which is why they’re on my very short ignore list). I think it was Martin Hyde who completely made up a fake persona and contributed for almost 20 years before finally being found out and banned. It happens.
Without digging into forensic detail I’m slightly inclined to think otherwise. However that’s just a hunch and this is one of those cases I could easily seeing it going either way. Some people are just really committed to their internet role-playing.
In general I think a lot of people on this board and really most long-time netizens have been burned often enough that they tend to be hypervigilant about trolls (not a real criticism, mind you - I get it). But often I think Occam’s Razor leads elsewhere. Stubborn, meandering cluelessness can look an awful lot like deliberate trolling tactics. But sometimes it is just stubborn, meandering cluelessness.
By the way, I’ve never really understood the joy of long-term community trolling. I mean I can get trying to get a rise out of people in the moment, out of annoyance or whatever (“well, what do you think of THIS gotcha, hypocrite!”). But the whole fake persona thing for years is the kind of unfun-seeming obsessive commitment that I have a hard time wrapping my head around. How is socking for years fun?
But then I feel much the same way about people who insist on playing certain tough computer games on the hardest possible setting, because challenge! Weird, defective mental cases, the lot of them 
.
Over on Wikipedia in my administrator days, I was a very active sockpuppet investigator. I did a lot of work identifying, outing, and blocking socks. So much so that after a while I could recognize someone immediately. And in a couple of cases they even reached out to me outside of Wikipedia, one even became something of a friend of mine outside of the project, and we’d exchange emails over the years. He was a really nice guy and very thoughtful. It didn’t give me any pause to block his repeated attempts to return to the project, though.
I tried to help reform him but it didn’t work, and we talked at length about why he did what he did. In his case it was a compulsion. He was addicted to it and just couldn’t stop.
If you ever watch the MTV show Catfish, there are a number of people who troll online with fake personas, and they have multiple reasons for doing so. The one common denominator is that they are very unhappy with who they are and want to be someone else, and bringing misery to other people can help boost their feeling of self-worth. (It’s the same drive that turns people into bullies; make yourself feel better by making other people feel worse.)
In general though, these aren’t gleeful pranksters who clap and giggle as they masterfully manipulate people. They’re sick, broken people, who do it to temporarily take away whatever fills them with self-loathing and depression.
Be glad you aren’t a troll.
I missed that. Where can I find it?
Here is the post that convinced me that NB is a troll.
Basically, NB claims to be trained to be a troll and does it for a living in some context, to “challenge people”, and is very proud of the fact. It puts his whole time here and the problems he has caused in another light.
After that was pointed out to me I put him on ignore.
Thanks! He forgot to mention that he always has unverifiable anecdotes that somehow exactly back up the point he’s trying to make. Must be part of his professional troll career to have tons of perfectly apt anecdotes that definitely and for sure happened in real life.
So is it District of Columbia, Detective Constable, or Doctor of Chiropractic?
Well, I think Detective Constable would be DC Honeybadger. And of course Doctor of Chiropractic should be written Honeybadger “D” C.
Not quite the same thing, but … years ago I used to play a lot of pinochle on Yahoo Games. There were a lot of “players” whose entire MO was joining a game, taking 2:59 out of the maximum 3 minutes to play every single card, then getting the “win” when other players quit out of frustration. There was no money involved – all they got out of it was a higher rating and (I guess) the pleasure of knowing they’d annoyed people. In other words …
Direct Current? Maybe HoneyBadger is on Team Edison.
Honey Badger don’t care
Disingenuous Choad it is then.
We are all sick broken people. The question is, do we reach out to others to offer and receive support and healing, or do we reach out to inflict contagion and injury?
The world falls about when there is not enough of the former, and too much of the latter.
I always think of Andy Kaufman when I read about someone trolling for years. It seems like the sort of thing that he would have found hilarious.
Agree 100%
Umm, aren’t you supposed to be backing this,
Biden has done more to sew hatred and division in this country than any president in U.S. history.
up in another thread?
Kaufman absolutely was a troll. But he did it professionally for entertainment purposes. His fake dispute with Jerry Lawler was an example, or when he went in disguise as Tony Clifton to be an intentionally offensive stand-up comedian. “Heels” in pro wrestling are also trolls, and many “shock jocks” take on that role as well.
I do think there is a difference between someone who puts on a persona for professional reasons and causes controversy as a form of entertainment, and someone who does it solely for their own benefit. It’s a fine line but one I think is important.
I don’t think his Taxi costars found Tony Clifton all that entertaining.
As the dearly-departed Marley23 once put it, usually the simplest explanation is the best:
Probably they want to get caught. The joke’s no good if you’re the only one laughing at it. That might work if you’re a real prankster or Andy Kaufman, but that’s not who we’re dealing with here. We’re talking about simple people who are desperate for attention.