Why People Become Internet Trolls | Hacker News Reader

Why People Become Internet Trolls

dradambell.com

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I'll be honest. I really enjoy Ken M's work as an internet troll.

If you haven't seen what he does, here are some of my favorites:

https://www.reddit.com/r/KenM/comments/2oy2nb/chef_boyardee/

https://www.reddit.com/r/KenM/comments/4e888v/ken_m_on_pampe...

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/39/3a/7e/393a7e7d56c65bc9afd0...

https://www.reddit.com/r/KenM/comments/8ptb4r/kenm_on_kissin...

https://www.reddit.com/r/KenM/comments/8n25qu/first_post_her...

He is more on the comedy side. Trolling usually harms, he doesn't.

He’s a benevolent troll, like 3YearLetterman.

What would constitute trolling?

I personally wouldn’t consider suicide baiting to be trolling. Passing outright personal insults, or engaging in character assasination is also not trolling.

These exhibit psycopathic behavior.

Also responding to insults with insults doesn’t mean the other side had just become a troll as the cited study seems to imply.

> The more accountable we are for our behavior, the less potential we have of becoming trolls. Employing less anonymity may help, but this raises privacy concerns for many. Anonymity can also be a good thing. Benign disinhibition — the friendly sibling of toxic disinhibition — is where users freely discuss their deepest insecurities and concerns with other users. This can be very therapeutic and shouldn’t be discouraged. But by using anonymity only where it is necessary, we reduce the likelihood of toxic disinhibition.

This seems highly unlikely to me.

Consider Twitter, Blue-checkmarks, as well as Facebook. There are countless trolls with verified identities. Indeed, "troll behavior" has permeated into our political system and very public figures are openly using anti-social language... to the benefit of their political movements.

From a Machiavellian perspective: people become trolls because it works. Its an effective strategy for gathering like-minded followers, and to demonstrate a "leadership" quality, one that demonstrates ambitious behavior.

Some political leaders are incredibly similar to trolls. Robespierre, Lenin, Hitler. Yeah, we look down upon them decades later, but these figures were hugely influential during their times and got a lot of things accomplished.

This article assumes that troll-behavior is not beneficial to the troll. That's a horrible miscalculation. Troll-behavior certainly hurts the victim, but it seems to benefit the troll in my experience. At a minimum, it benefits them with followers (other trolls who want to help the greater cause).

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So lets circle back to the top. Why do people become trolls?

Answer: Because its an effective strategy.

The important followup question: How do we build a world (or if not the world... then at least a community) where trolling becomes an ineffective, or counter-productive strategy?

We have to increase the general level of consciousness of the average citizen. High-consciousness individuals do not seek to troll, and see through the troll's bullshit and do not engage with it.

> High-consciousness individuals do not seek to troll

This seems naive to me. If trolling is an effective strategy, then high-consciousness individuals will seek to troll to further their own gains.

> and see through the troll's bullshit and do not engage with it

Are you certain that this strategy stops trolls? Or does this only give trolls more room to spew their ideology, growing their political power?

There's a spectrum of course, but at high levels of consciousness selfish gains are not priority goals. The goals tend to be selfless, loving and holistic.

If the level of consciousness in the general population is high enough, trolling will be a behavior of the past, like human sacrifice.

Your interpretation is a spiral dynamics stage orange criticism of green and turquoise. The spiral dynamics model of psycho/social development is really good for analyzing and explaining these types of problems, like being able to predict human behavior and understand why certain humans behave the ways that they do.

How do you determine where a particular person is positioned on the spectrum? What is the process for measuring whether one person has a higher or lower level of consciousness than another?

The easiest tell is the size of the perpective/identity, stage red/orange very single-human self-concerned where as higher stages, green yellow, turquoise have concern for the environment, animals, all humanity. If you check out a brief overview of spiral dynamics you can see the scale of levels of consciousness. I'm not saying it's the only model but it is quite useful and it is a scientific model developed by Clare Graves.

Who ever said anything about selfishness?

The worst trolls are the ones with ideology, who believe themselves to be working on behalf of a greater power. To take a relatively innocent example: Tesla Trolls will harass, dox, and even SWAT "Tesla Shorts", in defense of their beloved company.

So lets circle back again: Why are these Tesla trolls trolling the internet? Because they're fighting to support their company, and it seems to be an effective tactic for intimidating and silencing critics.

Same things happen with Apple Fanboys, XBox fanboys, etc. etc. Trolls "fight" on behalf of the powers they've given their allegiance to. And of course, Democrats and Republicans are big ones too... but also subgroups: Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Proud Boys, etc. etc. They all have trolls, they all will harass and demean you if you disagree with them online.

Any "serious" internet discussion will devolve into troll tactics these days. Why? Because its effective. Apple vs Epic Games is just the latest bit, and we're certainly going to see internet trolls start to weaponize forums to bring people to their side.

> _further their own gains_

That was what made me think you were refering to selfishness.

High consciousness by definition resists ideology. Ideology is a limitation of consciousness.

Trolls that are harassing, doxing, and SWATing, are doing it for selfish reasons, even if their excuse is something external.

Intimidating and silencing critics, classic stage red, sound like any presidents you know?

I don't disagree that trolling is effective, the majority of the population is somewhere in stage red/blue/orange, very few of us are green or above.

I understand what you're explaining, I think having an overview of the model will help you understand what I am pointing to.

The article equates "trolling" with phishing and harassment. It states "Trolling is a hard concept to define" and uses this as a convenient excuse to make false equivalences. The term "troll" is actually easy to define: "antisocial, quarrelsome and slow-witted creatures which make life difficult for travelers." Its the literal interpretation from norse folklore. The troll doesn't follow you around, build a following, or encourage suicide. The troll sits under a bridge and charges you a "toll" (time, monetary, or emotional) as you pass by it.

One could argue that this author is trolling their audience with obfuscatory language.

I prefer the urbandictionary definition:

“Trolling on-line forums as described above is actually analogous to the fishing technique of “trolling”, where colorful baits and lures are pulled behind a slow moving boat.”

I think that definition has too much overlap with the already popularized coinage "Phishing" where a user is baited into giving up something.

The article seems to just use fancy words to say "because they're assholes".

That's a bit of a simplification, isn't it?

Here's the first major point of the article

> The human brain was primarily designed for face-to-face interaction. It hasn’t had time to adapt to communication over the internet.

> If you say something mean to my face and make me cry, you will probably start to feel uncomfortable. Unless you’re especially mean or psychopathic, my distress will trigger an empathic response and lead you to have mercy. If you tweet something mean and make me cry, no amount of emojis can convey what the sight of a grown man weeping can. If there is no social cue to elicit an empathic response, you might continue your tirade of meanness.

> The absence of nonverbal feedback leads to an “empathy deficit,” and this is what sociopaths suffer from.

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So the first point made by the article is about the lack of instinctive empathy offered by the online environment. Without a face to see how the other person is reacting, we're blind to the subtle clues about their emotion.

> The human brain was primarily designed for face-to-face interaction

In fairness this seems vague and simplistic. I would argue that people have always behaved like this when they were anonymous (and therefore free from the consequences of their actions). This Fellini movie clip (I Vitelloni) predates the internet by several decades and yet shows an egregious example of trolling:

https://youtu.be/nVQV3WEoQDU

(the initial line is simply "workeeers! Prrrr")

I was going to say "because it's fun"

I've been accused of being a troll multiple times. It typically happens when I spot vague but powerful claims from somebody who claimed to be highly educated.

For example, somebody may claim that a programming or software technique is "clearly better". I ask for clear-cut objective evidence, and they either cannot provide it, or make unproven assumptions about the thought process of the programmer's mind.

The bottom line is that programming productivity is largely something that happens inside the human mind; it's not about machines nor pure logic. They didn't seem to understand this, trying to turn it into a "purist" argument about math and logic alone. Sorry, it's not, you have to consider the poorly-mapped human mind in the end.

Also, high-end academics tend not to understand business. They may say parsimony (least code) is the best, for example. I'll then point out that many coders find highly compact code hard to read or debug. They may reply "then get better programmers". That's usually not practical from a business standpoint for various reason I don't have room for. Their alternatives usually have a lot of holes, not knowing how business works.

I admit I took pleasure in rubbing their nose in these facts and gaps because they made smug claims. There's a certain wonderful satisfaction in making smug people trip on their own logic, reminding me of a show where a corporate polluter ultimately dies by falling into their own pollution pile. Maybe I'm a bit narcissistic, I don't know. But it's worthy criticism that hopefully wakes them up regardless. Being logically whipped by a "troll" can be fruitful education.

I also rip into interpretations of terminology like "best practices", definition of OOP, "types", "intent", and many others. Somebody will claim it clear cut and settled, but it's not, and I poke holes in all their defenses.

There are different kinds of trolls. Some just want to agitate for agitation alone. But I instead beat people up with their own logic, rather than use tricks and personal digs. I have been accused of "word play", but vague words are fair game for word play in order to demonstrate they are vague. They wouldn't be "playable" if they weren't vague. People tend to assume their own interpretation of words is universal. It's usually not; but they are reluctant to admit it.

Being in dozens of vocab debates, I'm pretty skilled at picking apart vagueness, and the other side realizes they are out-gunned and go bonkers on the way down, smoking. I don't claim to be smarter, I just selected a few areas where I perfect the art of "trolling" via experience alone.

And sometimes I am actually wrong and learn something along the way. Good debates do that.

Very lazy analysis. Arm chair e-diagnosing everyone who doesn't exclusively use the internet to send cat pictures and pictures of their lunch as having a dark triad personality disorder is just as abusive as the 'trolling' he hopes to prevent.

The article seems quite different than what you are describing.

He’s trolling you

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