http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll
:lol :lol
:lol :lol
Proposed motivations for trolling:
* Self-proclaimed trolls and their defenders suggest that trolling is a clever way of improving discussion, or an alternative method of viewing power relations on large public wikis.
* Anonymous attention-seeking: The troll seeks to dominate the thread by inciting anger, and effectively hijacking the topic at hand.
* Cry for help: Many so-called trolls, in their postings, indicate disturbing situations regarding family, relationships, substances, and school. Some believe that trolling is an aggressive, confrontational way by which trolls seek a sort of tough love guidance in an anonymous forum.
* Effect change in user opinions: A troll may state extreme positions to make his or her actual beliefs seem moderate (This often involves sock puppeteering, where the bad cop is a sock-puppet troll.) or, alternatively, play the role of Devil's advocate to strengthen opposing convictions [with which he or she usually actually agrees].
* Test the integrity of a system against social attacks or other forms of misbehavior: For example, blatantly violating terms-of-use in order to see whether any action is taken by the site administrators.
* Amusement: To some people, the thought of a 70-year-old Internet user being sent to a sexually explicit or gross image is genuinely funny. People opposed to trolling think of individuals of this sort as immature and annoying.
* Wasting others' time: One of the greatest themes in trolling is the idea that you can spend one minute of your time posting a troll, causing 10 other people to waste ten minutes of their time, more or catalytically affecting lots of other people. Most trolls enjoy the idea that they wasted others time at comparatively little effort on their behalf.
* Domino effect: Related to amusement, but a more specific fashion: starting large chain reactions in response to one's initial post. Achieving a disproportionately large response to a small action is the general theme. This is similar to how a young child that goes missing (but is actually hiding) may act with glee, seeing a large number of people conducting a massive search in response to the supposed disappearance.
* Fight "groupthink": Many trolls defend their actions as, when a sort of conformism settles, shocking people out of it.
* Satire: In these cases, the individuals do not think of themselves as trolls, but misunderstood humorists or political commentators.
* Personal attacks against one particular user or group of users
* Self-promotion
* Lowering signal to noise ratio: On Slashdot, points that could be used to moderate interesting things up get wasted on moderating down things like ASCII pictures of the goatse man. This lowers the quality of comments at certain thresholds.
Since there is a wide spectrum of possible motivations for trolls, some of these functions being benevolent and others, clearly malevolent, to typecast users as trolls in the negative sense is often rash.
Some users of Internet forums are considered to be "trollhunters", or "trollbaiters". They willingly enter conflict when trolls emerge. Often, trollhunters are as disruptive as trolls. A single troll-post may be ignored, but if ten trollhunters "pounce" following a troll, they will drive the thread offtopic.
Regarding troll-related conflicts, there are five groups into which users might be classified:
* Trolls are users who actively provoke conflict.
* Trollhunters (or Trollbaiters) behave according to a principle of "second strike". They do not initiate conflict, but escalate it once it begins. Often they use other trolls as an excuse for their own misbehavior, and in many cases, typecast a user as a "troll" regardless of his or her intent.
* Ignorers seek to ignore the conflict, continuing with the topic at-hand. They usually express a nonchalant disdain for the troll, but do not seek actively to insult him or her. They behave like elders, issuing simple words of wisdom such as "Do not feed the trolls." or other phrases that generally mean the same thing: "Ignore the troublemaker and he will give up and go away."
* Moderators (not in the same sense as a "system moderator") seek to resolve the conflict, making all parties happy, if possible.
* Bystanders withdraw from the conflict. In particularly bad cases, they will leave the forum in disgust.
In the attention-seeking cases, trolls seek the conflict provided by trollbaiters, whereas in the "cry for help" cases, they seek the consolance and compassion offered by moderators.
The Media UK forums had to close down because of trolls and libellous postings, and the Digital Spy forums have a no-troll policy so as to stop trolls registering. Both use VBulletin software.