Then there’s no point in starting the thread. You can’t expect people to answer the question “Why do you talk to X?” if you’re not willing to say who X is.
I’m pretty sure I am recently guilty of this, and all I can say is that a lot of times you don’t realize someone is 1) a troll or 2) completely obtuse and unreachable by reason, until you’ve already wasted a bunch of posts on them. Sorry.
Because I don’t know they’re trolls, don’t realize it until too late, or give them the benefit of the doubt?
Besides, I’m really bad at remembering who’s who on a message board. So, the likelihood that I will notice a trend, or have a clue about a particular poster’s history is almost nil.
There’s your answer.
It boils down to pure Darwinism. Trolls are natural attention-seekers, so they’ve evolved personalities best suited attract people’s attention, even if it’s just to make fun of them. Successful trolls evoke responses; unsuccessful trolls aren’t skilled enough to get attention, so eventually they slink off and mutate into spammers instead.
If you love me so much, come over and do my laundry. :rolleyes:
Don’t feel bad. I think we’ve all fallen for this sort of thing more than once in our time on the internet and at least you know you’re not alone.
If someone is objectively identifiable as a troll, they will be banned. If they are not objectively identifiable as such, then it’s just your opinion that they are trolls.
Accept it as a hypothetical: there is a poster who you have concluded is either one of the two - either a troll or someone who is not just arrogant and ignorant but willfully ignorant and loving all the negative attention. Do you keep engaging?
I apologize for telling anyone else what to do. Some here find an obvious troll/attention whore to be amusing and will feed for that reason; some perhaps get off on the feeling of superiority they get after having been baited into beating someone up.
As I am keeping this hypothetical and refusing to be specific in a public venue then maybe this should really be a GD, I don’t know, but it involves Pit behavior, continued harassment of someone who clearly gets off on provoking that harassment, so I felt it was best here. I could be wrong.
John where is the line drawn between a troll and an attention whore who is just willfully and arrogantly ignorant? The intent in both cases is to provoke the negative responses. One I guess is presenting a false image of who they are and another merely exaggerates their real features. As long as their is reasonable doubt that they are the latter and not the former they will not be banned. What objective measure do you know of to make that assessment? The mods will do their best and give a wide benefit of the doubt I am sure.
You can ask the question “Why do you talk to posters with characteristics “X”?” which is what the OP did. It’s a weak OP but it isn’t inherently illogical or silly.
Huh. Still cracks me up.
To add to this rather excellent reason:
1.) It’s hard to keep track of the good guys and bad guys on SD; there are just too many posters. Unless you live on the boards you may not have noticed that the person in question has behaved badly three times in the space of a week. So you are left to rely on your own experience to determine who is and who is not a troll. Then it takes awhile to sort the uninformed from the willfully ignorant (and, by that point, you’ve probably been arguing with them for awhile).
2.) People watching a thread might not be aware that a given poster is a troll, even if you are. By arguing with the troll you save the watchers from taking them seriously, thereby fighting the ignorance of reasonable readers who were not sufficiently informed on the issue (think the post Liberal linked above).
3.) Hi, Opal.
My answer is that if I personally think someone is an obvious troll, then I don’t engage them. If I do engage with someone that you feel is an obvious troll, it just means that it hasn’t become obvious to me yet.
That doesn’t make the other posters right. How do you know that the positions of the other posters are right? There are a number of positions that are held at the Dope that are not popularly held in the wider society of the US. And the Dope has a fairly US-centric viewpoint. So it may just be that the person might be “right” by majority viewpoint if they weren’t posting on the Dope.
Using other posters’ opinions as a measure of whether someone is right or wrong is not a good one, especially on a message board like the Dope where there are lots of minority opinions in the wider society that are agreed upon here.
It depends on how I’ve determined that they’re willfully ignorant. If they’re just posting threads that don’t make sense repeatedly, I try to point that out to others in the correct venue.
But if I just disagree, they have equal chance of being right. If I think they’re not understanding the complexity of my argument, I’d probably move on. But they may not be willfully ignorant; plain unsophisticated is sufficient for that.
But in this case, characteristic “X” is too vague to be of any use.
OOooo, it makes me so MAD!!!
Given that the definition of trolling includes intent, I’d love to know how you can objectively identify it. You’re also assuming the mods will always ban people who troll, which is complete tosh. People like Diogenes have trolled plenty of times and never been banned.
Don’t know why trolling isn’t allowed anyway, they can be quite amusing. The crappy ones can be ignored.
It’s like tonguing a sore spot in your mouth when you know that you shouldn’t. That’s pretty much the best I can do to explain it. Sometimes the drive to fight ignorance/stupidity/lies is strong enough that good sense gets drowned out. Of course, there are also times when it’s clear that a troll isn’t going to go away or get banned any time soon, and it’s amusing enough for me to make fun of them a bit.
There’s also the fact that, unfortunately, trolls often aim to deceive and mislead those who are reading along. Dishonesty and deception are things that I absolutely cannot stand. And I’d sometimes rather feed a troll then allow them to trick other people.
Of course, sometimes the trolling is so blatant that it’s more laughable that something that has to be responded to. I won’t name names as you’ve requested, but there’s a thread in GD right now that’s being trolled so hilariously and with such determination that the troll in question has produced a self-caricature and is its own best refutation. At times like that, I can step back and laugh, perhaps after poking at the troll’s stupidity once or twice for fun.
If you ever think I’m trolling, fucking report me. No go fuck yourself, whoever you are.
Sorry about that guys. I guess I got successfully trolled. You live you learn.
Ah well.
I already said I don’t think trolls should be banned, so I don’t know why I would do that. I wasn’t insulting you anyway, there’s no need for such language. Your trolling is usually pretty good, though sometimes it really gets over the top. Certainly better than the average troll!
What makes society at large necessarily right then? Sometimes multiple posters, especially many varied different ones with no axes to grind, are correct if they are butting their heads up against someone who, say, mischaracterizations others’ positions, projects their own biases, and disregards information.
Just disagreeing with someone isn’t enough of a reason to view them as a troll and I’m sure that in plenty of cases, “plain unsophistication” would indeed be enough to simply note the situation and move on. However, I think if someone repeatedly displays blatant dishonesty with their debate (for lack of a better word) tactics, then that person is something much more and undoubtedly would fall under the heading of “willfully ignorant.”
Eh, as a hypothetical it works well enough.
And good points Finn, but although I all too well understand the desire to fight ignorance for those following along at home, I sometimes think with people like this ignoring their attention-whore craving is what’s best served because then there isn’t piles of their false bullshit for anyone to wade through. Then they go away sooner.