I recently finished reading We Are the Nerds, which is about the history of Reddit (the company) and its community. One of the interesting parts was about the moderator of a bunch of subreddits that were full of all kinds of borderline illegal and definitely illegal content (u/violentacrez, if you feel the need to Google for yourself).

If you're a long-time Reddit user, you probably already know this, but here goes: He was eventually exposed by a journalist. Surprisingly, he is actually a pretty normal middle-aged man. He worked as a programmer (and was immediately fired when the news aired). He has a disabled wife for whom he is the sole financial support. If I remember correctly, he has adult children, who were aware of what he did on Reddit and had usernames that referenced their relationship with him. Apparently, he used his time on Reddit as a way to relieve stress, or something like that.

I'm not entirely certain what motivates people to act like that online when they're relatively normal offline, but it seems to be a somewhat common occurrence.

Territorial aggression.

There is trolling-as-prank which is inclusive of others in the forum where it takes place (although it may involve mockery of individuals) and raiding behavior, which is designed to damage the forum itself. The latter is area denial which is meant to gain leverage over a platform and (ideally) to take it over. This originated in rivalries (friendly not-so-friendly) between bulletin- and image-board operators, but has since been weaponized to quasi-political ends.

> But who are those boards? Why are the people who go there so nuts?

I mean, in my darker, misanthropic side of my personality I think it would be pretty funny if someone Zoom-bombed my really, REALLY boring monthly electronic Database system update training I have to go to on Thursday morning at 7am for 90 minutes, and like... played videos of puppies or something. But I get a chuckle out of that thought and drink my coffee and pay attention to the training like I always do.

4chan is a big place with a long history. It's kind of like 50 different websites and communities under one domain, where there's surprisingly little overlap between them all. I think you'd find that most people who visit the less notorious boards on 4chan are your totally normal geek crowd.

Is it really surprising ? Not everyone wired the same. For some people they think its fun. Its just human.

Are you not aware of people's great capacity for compartmentalization?

I ponder these same questions when I think about who voted for Trump, turns out, 4chan has many Trump supporters.

/b/tard here. If you do public stuff on the internet, it's practically the obligation of the internet to show up and do something stupid.

As far as I can tell, somewhere over the last 15 years, people began to confuse "the internet" with "real life". It's important to know that hosting a public space on the internet is not the same as hosting a public space in real life.

I don't think this is even a so terrible example of trolling. A well run AA group could use it as a teachable moment to reinforce their message. It's certainly memorable.

And the people trolling are probably all hanging out on discord, making friends, having the modern equivalent of old-fashioned fun. Just a bunch of bored people seeing what they can get away with to entertain themselves on the internet.

When I was a kid, the neighborhood boys got caught throwing rocks at cars just because they wanted to see what would happen. They also stuck firecrackers in things. Once some teenagers took a baseball bat to every mailbox on the street while hanging out of a car window. Trolling an AA zoom meeting is significantly less bad than any of that.

I would argue that trolling is actually a bit higher-minded than previous generations of trouble-making. When you're restricted to operating only online, outside of physical space, you have to be a bit more clever in your trouble-making. Clever probing of the world to see how it responds is fun, especially with the constraint of "must be done entirely online". It's also largely harmless, because nobody can get physically hurt, and it leads to better safeguards in our online systems.

If you view trolling in that way, I think it's really a sign that our culture is advancing. If a successful troll is possible, it indicates some kind of weakness that needs to be patched. You can't stop the trolls, so you might as well extract what value you can from their work. Also what and how they troll is a sign of the times. The Trump presidency was fairly predictable if you watched the steady increase in what we'd now call "alt-right" ideology on 4chan. As goes /b/, so goes mainstream culture. I guess, in a way, you could say that trolling is a art.

Is this a joke? 4chan is the well-known internet forum/image board. https://www.4chan.org/