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Comment by larnmar | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of eternal September, I feel like some of the latecomers need to be educated on the actual meaning of “troll” (eg this writer, and most journalists).

A troll is someone who posts deliberately provocative content for the purposes of deriving shits and giggles from the outraged responses of others.

A propagandist is not a troll. A paid shill is not a troll. A person who sincerely holds views which you dislike is not a troll. Only a troll is a troll.

This being so, I’m not convinced that trolls are a significant issue at this point, although partially it’s getting harder to tell due to Poe’s Law.

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The problem is the two concepts are symbiotic.

You start out a conspiracy with trolling and people doing it for the lulz and the reactions, and eventually you end up drawing in the unstable and mentally ill as true believers.

Which can lead to unpleasant outcomes, like pizzagate or Qanon.

Once the trolls realized that they could convince enough people to join or believe them to impact the real world it was over for internet freedom. The people that have held power for generations don't like losing that power. It's a shame that we'll lose most of the good parts of the internet along with it too, and all we'll be left with is a platform for entertainment of the most clicks. The internet can't route around broken culture.

> The internet can't route around broken culture.

That explains quite a bit. So many of us thought that the internet was going to change society for the better. Instead, society changed the internet for the worse.

Utopian visions always have the problem of dealing with the humans that we have, not the humans that we wish we had.

Humanity has and will continue to be the downfall of many a grand vision.

The internet simply became a better mirror. It becomes more human every day. This is what humanity actually looks like on a larger scale.

Now that we can see ourselves at a scale we've never been able, we have an opportunity to make adjustments at scale, which is a process that takes generations.

One thing all the conspiracy nut circles have in common, is that it's always YouTube videos that they use to try to convince the non-believers of their preferred kind of crazy.

So I wonder what role YouTube monetization plays in this. How much money can you make grifting the gullible off of YouTube ads? As for q-anon, there's plenty of characters straight up selling merchandise, which should clue you in to what kind of operation it actually is.

It wasn't that long ago that YouTube decided to de-monetize all antivaxx videos. Has that had a noticeable outcome? If amoral grifters can't make money peddling bullshit ideas, do they do it less? Are there fewer antivaxx videos being made today, than a year ago? Are fewer people being sucked into that particular conspiracy bullshit today, than a year ago?

How much do the major news networks make overhyping and overplaying headlines that take things completely out of context, like the oceans running out of oxygen or some other bullshit? How many decades did we hear cholesterol and fat were bad for us before that was flat out debunked? You act like there are good guys and bad guys here and not 5000 shades of grey and that it's easy or desirable for Google to be an arbiter of truth.

>cholesterol and fat were bad for us [...] was flat out debunked

That's a new one. Besides, isn't this how science is supposed to work? Improving accuracy, discarding what doesn't work?

The point is that consensus was one thing for decades and then it was later overturned. But if "the platform" backs the consensus then you don't get opinions that challenge status quo in the first place. I don't want to live in a society like that. Might as well be in China.

It goes the other way too, with state-sponsored groups using troll tactics and even enlisting "for the lulz" trolls to disrupt conversations that don't suit them.

Also, while it's true that "troll" gets used too lightly sometimes, it's also true that a high percentage of those who like to point it out just don't want to examine their own genuinely troll-ish behavior. Examples of "telling hard truths" and "consider all sides" and "devil's advocate" abound here.

Agreed, I’ve noticed a trend where people call anyone who publicly expresses a view that they disagree with a “troll”.

Heretic is so passe.

I think people started using the term as a cheap dismissal before it recently morphed into such a catch all for "anyone who disagrees with me."

Incedentally, there's a weird sort of paradox in the nature of online communication. On one hand, you have a medium where information spreads instantaneously and one could expect, given that we are all exposed to effectively the same global platform, that language might homogenize and evolve more slowly. On the other hand, it's interesting to see how internet lingo tends to shift in meaning seemingly even more quickly than IRL language. There's some deeper conclusion here somewhere regarding the nature of human language but I'm having trouble conceptualizing it.

The proper term is "flamer". Political Twitter is mostly flamers, not trolls.

True but then that writer would have a much smaller ax to grind...

J. Bradford DeLong is hardly a latecomer. He has been around longer than most of those reading this, quite likely including you. You might feel he needs to be corrected, but "educated" is an attempt to claim relative authority that might not be deserved (even if it's relevant).

> "A propagandist is not a troll. A paid shill is not a troll. A person who sincerely holds views which you dislike is not a troll. Only a troll is a troll."

It's orthogonal to all of those. Not all propagandists are trolls, but some certainly are.

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