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Comment by coldblues | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately the term "troll" has indeed been muddled. Often times I see people use them so incorrectly. You speak to someone calmly and someone suddenly throws the world "troll" at you. Like "Yeah, ok, you're trolling."

I don't get it. How do you come to that conclusion? People with a different set of opinions than yourself would go out of their way to have a conversation with you, construct a neat and tidy identity, just to make you angry? And this is not even in political conversation, sometimes it's just that you have different preferences. In what communities is it so common to have people so obsessed that they construct fictional identities and weaponize a constructed set of beliefs they don't even associate with, just to piss someone off?

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I think those “false positives” (to put them most charitably) come from the cultural bubbles we all live with and have always lived with.

Whether it’s because of your class, your friends, your region, or now your online circles, you have some natural sense of the world and the range of familiar sincere beliefs — even the ones you disagree with.

But sometimes when you encounter someone new, they’re perspective is do alien that you can’t integrate it at all. A first reaction is to just assume they’re being insincere and provocative, and because trolls (and “bots” and “shills”) are a foundational archetype of online life, you can’t help but wonder if you’ve encountered one.

It’s going to happen. The responsible next step is to be attentive to that possibility without becoming strictly convinced and accusatory. But that can be hard.

Because a very large amount of modern people believe that the consensus they've had constructed for them is the objective truth and if you say anything that calls that into question the only possibility is that you're trolling.

And it's articles like this one that largely cause this. They leave no room for the possibility that someone is genuinely provoking a response that mocks their view by the very absurdity of those views. Instead it's just oh no the ministry of truth signed off on those views and you're perfectly sensible to hold them and if anybody calls them into question they're hostile sadistic psychopathic trolls.

The research in the article is actually based on the self-reports of volunteers.

Your mind's gonna get blown when you learn about Wittgenstein's language games and family resemblance.

> In what communities is it so common to have people so obsessed that they construct fictional identities and weaponize a constructed set of beliefs they don't even associate with, just to piss someone off?

In most online communities.

> weaponize a constructed set of beliefs they don't even associate with, just to piss someone off?

This happens more often than you think.

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