Comment by Loveaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Loveaway | Hacker News Reader

I used to enjoy typing “ggez” at the end of multiplayer matches. Especially if it was an even game or close victory.

Some people would just explode in anger at the sight of it, it’s unbelievable. Someone once messaged me after that for a solid hour just venting like a mad man.

Well who do you think is the one with the issues here, I’m just a random stranger throwing out a 4 letter bait. What is the point of getting upset? Literally zero benefit whatsoever. It’s like people loosing their mind in traffic, who exactly are you yelling at inside your car?

Of course not talking about things like bullying, stalking, plain mean people.

But genuine trolls are good people! Provoking strong emotional reactions with basically zero effort is just holding a mirror in front of people. I always hoped it would eventually lead people to self-reflect.

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edit: ok I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend. Don’t take life so serious. I’m not a sociopath or having delusions of helping people, thanks for suggesting the diagnosis though. In the future I’ll do my best to not stir up any unnecessary negative emotions!

> But genuine trolls are good people! Provoking strong emotional reactions with basically zero effort is just holding a mirror in front of people

The language and thinking you use here seems worryingly close to sociopathy. I say this because the language above discounts the pain experienced. So to respond in a relatively clinical way, using that kind of language, no, doing that is not just a mirror. It is your choice to introduce a statistically likely stressor with a statistically predictable stress response.

If a person knows there is a high probability that doing X will upset people, under what conditions is doing so ethical?

If you claim to "be teaching them an important lesson" then you probably should pause and study human psychology. Exposing people ad-hoc (in an uncontrolled setting) to a stressor is not a generally good strategy to "cure" them of the response. There is lots of research here: I recommend learning more.

Generally we don’t like to think of ourselves as hurting others to make us feel good - we’ll come up with all kinds of excuses: we’re only trying to help, they shouldn’t have been hurt anyway, they deserved it, I didn’t mean it that way, yadda yadda yadda.

Ultimately they’re all just excuses. The truth is, it feels good to hurt other people, that truth makes most people deeply uncomfortable, and will concoct nearly any excuse to cope with that cognitive dissonance. Nobody likes to think of themself as a bad guy.

> Provoking strong emotional reactions with basically zero effort

This is just a justification to yourself of sociopathy. Of course there are lots of easy things you can do to upset people. Your job as a citizen is to learn not to do that and apologize.

A lot of the replies mention sociopathy, but couldn't this be something else? Maybe you are in the position where you aren't phased by provocations and find it weird how people are so easily negatively influenced. Essentially, when you provoke someone, you indeed put up an easy bait to provoke a reaction out of someone, and if they fall for it, you can assume that the person might not be acting logically or rationally most of their life. After all, how can something so simple enact such rage from someone, they must be crazy if they don't just ignore it, at least get mildly frustrated. Are they the sort of person to yell in the restaurant if someone forgets to put cream in their coffee? It could also be a method to differentiate between the seasoned gamers and those who are new to it. After all, banter and shit-talking was prevalent and you had to adapt to it to remain in that space, and before you knew it, you were part of it.

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