What makes a Troll?

Great Debates
1

Originally started in the Pit. (For anyone interested in the backstory).

I’m trying to think of a way that the rules could be changed to allow one poster to call another poster a troll. The rudimentary outline I’ve thought of goes like this:

A)‘He’s green and lives under a bridge’ type of posts should be treated under the current guidelines of "No calling another poster a troll’.

B)Allow “I am calling Poster Whomever a TROLL.” With the understanding that the accuser will be automatically handed a 30 day suspension. So you better back it up. If your accusation has merit (Herein lies the debate I suppose) and the accused ends up being banned for trollery you are at that point (regardless of ‘time served’), allowed back. However, If your troll accusation is overturned your suspension is turned into a BANNING. Also, only Members (or above) are allowed to do so - to prevent frivolous ‘Guest’ accusations.

What think you?

2

I think its a dumb rule to start out with. I can insinuate that a poster enjoys performing sex acts on goats but not that they are trolling? Makes no sense to me.

3

I realize that it has never been understood by anyone who chose to ignore the explanation the last 312 times it has been provided, but I will make one more attempt, since it is the topic of this thread:

There is nothing inherently evil about calling a troll a troll. It is not a worse accusation that insisting that a person enjoys engaging in sex with a dead parent.

HOWEVER, a troll is, by definition, a poster who submits stuff just to be disruptive. Over the years, we have discovered that the most surefire way to hijack a thread is to call a poster a troll. The accusation serves to invalidate everything s/he has posted (no worse than calling a poster a liar), but it does so in a way that pretty much inevitably leads to fierce, off-topic disputes as to whether the object of that name-calling is “REALLY” a troll or whether that person is simply inordinately stupid or bigoted or single-minded. Once the accusation had been hurled, hordes of supporters, either of the accuser or the accused would line up and start wrangling over whether it was “really trolling” or whether it was simple cluelessness or some other defect that caused their posts to be unnecessarily inflammatory.

Of course, with this as background, it became an easy tactic to destory a thread simply by tossing out the “troll” bomb–even when it was pretty clear that the accused was simply clueless or invincibly hostile but committed to his or her beliefs and to close threads or not at a point where passions were running really high (over a fairly trivial phenomenon).

Rather than continue to have to make rulings on whether a specific poster was or was not a troll, the rule was created that accusations of trolling had to be submitted privately to a Mod.

No one has to accept the logic behind this decision, but it should be recognized that it was an attempt to make a practical rule, not an attempt to legislate morality.

4

Hello, and good to meet you.

I can’t get to your proposal for how to make the accusation without stopping first at the question of whether it should ever be made. No matter how well-balanced the method, I’m not convinced that calling a troll a troll is the best way of dealing with them.

A lot depends, I think, on why we’re (almost unanimously, at least, I think) agreed that trollery is a bad thing. The registration agreement defines it as being “purposely inflammatory”, and the Pit rules refine that a little, saying that being inflammatory just to enjoy the heat, with no intent to advance the discussion, is what’s meant. So intent is key. So is the post’s target: if the purpose is to provoke anger directed at some issue or institution or public figure or private miscreant or even another poster, it’s usually got a place in one or more forums. If the purpose is to bask in outrage directed at one’s own naughty self, the powers that be bring out the hook. A lot seems to depend on whether the poster bothers to weave any actual facts or argument or cogent opinion relevant to the thread into his general participation (I certainly couldn’t meet that standard in every post, and I’m still here), and whether s/he seems amenable to Moderation. Even these are poor substitutes for actual telepathy, which is why there’s usually quite a history of misbehavior to view by the time the ATMB thread shows up.

We’ve been told to just ignore them so often, and been given excellent reasons for it, that everyone can accept that this is the best approach. The idea, I suppose, is to deprive would-be trolls of the attention they seek (that’s assuming that’s their intent, but it’s a decent assumption. I’ve known children who would continue to misbehave if ignored, taking delight in their “invisibility,” but not many). We’ve also seen this approach fail often enough to be reminded that irritation can overcome willpower. Also, the diagnosis is sometimes not immediately obvious, and posters will respond as they would to someone who deserved their attention. It might soon become evident, but by that time the blood pressure’s up and the brain has manufactured all sorts of devastating put-downs that it would be a crime not to use, and we’re off.

I frankly don’t think the ability to call a person a troll would have a positive impact. The word is no more or less cutting than any other, you can report posts without using it, and it continues to bathe trolls in attention.

In fact, your proposal might make trolling more attractive by making it possible (if unlikely) for a troublemaker to actually get someone suspended or banned if they can bait them into an accusation and then avoid the hook themselves.

It also puts far too much of the wrong kind of pressure on the SDMB administration. Should Popular Poster X, with a hundred thousand polite and helpful and friendly posts, make an accusation, the administration is unnecessarily forced to consider (at least after the fact, in the Pit) board politics instead of taking action on their own. Since the formal accusation isn’t needed in the first place to accomplish the goal of removing problem posters, it’s pretty much all downside.

5

Actually, if the accusation became permitted and common, wouldn’t it inevitably be directed against anyone with whom the accuser disagreed? I can easily imagine people who are not stupid, single-minded, clueless, inflammatory, or hostile being labelled because it’s simply too easy for someone to say “Oh, you only say [Bush is doing okay; capital punishment is immoral; The Daily Show is over-rated; there’s more to 9/11 than we are being told; eating meat is unethical etc.] because you’re a troll!” The people making the accusation could easily be the clueless ones, lazily using an ad hominem instead of a counterargument. For that matter, anyone who tells a joke which strikes a reader as unfunny could be accused. I’m simply pointing out that if troll accusations were permitted, rapidly and inevitably they’d be directed at people who clearly don’t deserve them.

6

Of course, as it stands right now the only way for a Troll to be banned is if they are stupid enough to confess to it.

december did the same thing a thousand times, yet he only got banned when he came out and confessed to it.

-Joe

7

How then is starting a thread disruptive? Quite often I’ve noticed that accused trolls are identified by their own OP’s. Naturally stupid or inflammatory OP’s will generate emotional responses but in my perfect world the rest of us would just ignore them or treat them with undeserved respect just like we do in real life. Negative responses to an inflammatory OP create disruption as well.

I think society hasn’t fully learned how to deal with trolls which is a fairly new phenomenon. To attach stigma to a troll is not enough. We should attach stigma to disruptive troll responders and call them billy goats.

8

Which was a phenomenon that we observed on the predecessor AOL board on many occasions. At that time, the staff had no power to remove a disruptive poster (unless the poster could be caught in a violation of AOL’s TOS), and the situation I described, above ruined many a good thread.

I believe you are mistaken in this assessment: witness the recent removal of drmark2000 and bigpappadiaz, neither of whom ever admitted to trolling. In contrast, december was capable of actually believing most of his posts (not the action of a troll), but was ousted when he was twice caught posting false information to deliberately enhance his position and to get a rise out of people.

This is not to say that we catch all trolls. The issue of whether december was actually a troll was hotly debated at the time and could probably still get a pretty fierce discussion going. (That topic is not a “Great debate,” so do not do it here.) But the very fact that we rarely have unanimity of belief regarding whether a poster is trolling combined with the phenomenon that such arguments derail other threads is one strong reason we do not believe that public asccusations are productive.

Side note: It is also possible for a good poster to practice a bit of trolling in a particular thread. It is not as though “trolling” is an indelible character stamp. Allowing the accusation of “trolling” to be applied to a poster in a thread where s/he is actually doing that has the unfortunate result of allowing the characterization to be hurled at them in any subsequent contentious thread, which is not fair and which does not enhance the board.