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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Trolling is a pretty vague word, it doesn't really mean anything. So it's hard to really reply to this with any degree of seriousness, if it even was serious to begin with. That said, on properly moderated forums, trolling would usually be moderated, by a human that proactively moderates discussions. Social media can't really do that because the scale of the moderation team they'd need to do it would be literally unthinkable. It's clear that they need huge moderation teams just to upkeep the crappy standard of handing reports inconsistently that they have today. Exactly what to do with that information, I don't know.

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Trolling is online speech used to deliberately upset others. That's it. That's what it means. It has a clear definition.

You might have wanted to say that no one can agree on what speech is trolling and what speech isn't, but that's not because the word is vague. It's because people disagree on the deliberate and the upset part.

It may be clear but it is also broad. The law is more narrow: there are forms of trolling that are illegal speech and there are some that are legal.

There may be a good moral argument to draw that line differently when the consequence is a ban from a commercial platform vs being locked in a prison.

I wouldn't define it as limited to online speech. And most trolling I'm familiar with is calling out asshats and holier than thou types in sarcastic and funny manner.

No definition is as concrete, unmallable, and unchanging as you seem to imagine.

No, I didn't mean to say that. Case in point... Even that definition is vague.

Can you elaborate? It seems definitionally straight forward to me, so I'm not sure what I'm missing.

"online speech used to deliberately upset others" does not actually distinguish trolling versus other malicious behaviors, such as just being rude and flippant on purpose, so it is not very precise. It also doesn't really describe the actual kinds of behaviors that trolls engage in, but rather constitutes a class of behaviors that are not necessarily obviously connected, so it's vague. There's a lot of different ways that people troll, and different kinds of trolling, and I don't feel like that definition really summarizes it. For example, the term "concern trolling" is generally included in the umbrella, but it's actually more subtle than just being used to upset others; it's subversive, but the goal isn't necessarily just to upset others.

Truthfully, the two observations are related: The word "trolling" being kind of vague is probably the main reason why people do not agree on what actually constitutes it.

from this thread, it sounds like you're saying spam has a clear, precise definition but trolling does not.

what then, in your mind, is the clear, precise definition of spam?

I'm a little frustrated here, because I never attempted to imply that SPAM is easier to define than trolling. If that's somehow something people are legitimately reading out of my replies, then I must've messed up somewhere. All I have been trying to suggest is that nobody has made a good faith argument in favor of allowing SPAM, which is not the case for trolling. But the thing is, while neither have a concise definition, and social media moderation are imperfect at dealing with both situations, it is MUCH easier for a human to distinguish SPAM from trolling. In some types of trolling, the very point of it is that it is difficult to distinguish from a good-faith post; if it wasn't, it would be bad bait. Whereas many SPAM patterns, by nature of being SPAM, are detectable just by looking at posting patterns and not even contents, which is basically the way that social media handles such content. You can't do that for human trolls, because human trolls don't look much different from a high level as other users do, especially depending on what kind of troll you're dealing with.

I am kind of surprised at how many different ways people have interpreted what I said. I'm frankly feeling a little defeated.

"such as just being rude and flippant on purpose"

How is that not trolling?

Trolling almost always involves fishing for a reaction by acting dishonestly or misleading. When you are simply rude and flippant on purpose, that's just being an asshole. If someone is rude to me, I don't say "ah, I just got trolled."

It sounds relatively straight forward to make it "Deceptive speech used to deliberately upset others or undermine discussion." Is that accurate and precise enough to cover your conceptualization of trolling?

You don't think that being purposefully rude is to solicit a reaction? I guess we'll have to disagree about that.

Yeah, I think it's to solicit a reaction 100%, but it's not subversive at all. Their intentions are clear. The "coaxed into a snafu" meme hints at the nature of what makes trolling unique versus just flaming. Reading back the last part of that sentence has teleported me back in time about 20 years.

It's definitely subversive, as it's subverting communications norms by being rude in the first place.

I mean in a different sense, in the sense that it is insincere. That's the problem with trolling right there. If you're sincere, it's obviously not trolling.

Argueing that something is trolling because it solicits a reaction, or that because it's disruptive it counts as trolling, doesn't make sense. You can't distinguish trolling without knowing someone's motivations. Posts that could be trolling could just as easily be venting, or bringing up a genuine concern that just happens to be contentious, or etc.

Otherwise, flaming people in general is obviously trolling. That's not the way the word trolling has been used historically.

It's not insincere. Perhaps you mean unkind?

I just looked and plenty of definitions of trolling seem to invoke the same idea of insincerity.

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