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Comment by OfSanguineFire | Hacker News Reader

I miss the troll culture that Slashdot had, people put a lot of work into crafting elaborate jokes. Many Slashdot regulars intentionally browsed at -1 so that, on slow news days, they could read some of the inventive troll posts: Netcraft is Dying, Penisbird Enterprises, Batman Touched my Junk, etc. HN does have good discussion, but the culture here is not welcoming of jokes, and when those jokes get modded down, dead, or flagged, the controls for people to view them regardless are less convenient than Slashdot’s were.

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Counterpoint - strong prank and joke culture can quickly turn to a closed subculture that is offputting to otherwise superb contributors. I really enjoy HN due to the generally lukewarm and civilized discussion the rules promote. I love jokes and filthy humour, but gladly seek them elsewhere.

Absolutely nothing wrong with closed subcultures. The need to draw as large an audience as possible in order to satisfy investors, is part of why discussion on sites like Reddit is so flawed.

Totally agree. I was not pitching for large audience, the dryness creates a specific exclusivity in itself. HN subculture is focused on conrete subjects with world class subject experts occasionally pitching in.

Tons of things wrong with closed subcultures. Do we only want to hear from TechBros about the latest fad, currently how awesome LLMs are, with no dissenting opinion to provide any sort of debate? I, for one, welcome our large audience, because this place has more posts than Slashdot, has wireless, and isn't lame(most of the time).

This would be bad if these closed subcultures were the only cultures to exist.

But that would be a self-contradiction, by the virtue of being closed, there are people who are not part of them, so they cannot be the only culture.

Elitism is a disease we should not cater to in any circumstance.

Don't worry, most aren't.

I've never figured out what people mean by the tech elite. Internally I only see regular rich people and folks who find blinking lights fascinating. Using interest in a subject as a barrier to entry seems like a fairly straightforward noise filter.

I miss the old school trolls where entertainment was as much a goal as annoyance.

Elaborate castles in the clouds of unbelievable yarns, like an episode of Would I Lie To You?

Yeah. unfortunately the word trolling sometime over the past 15 years started to merge with what was customarily referred to as griefing or flame bait or flaming itself. The crucial quality that a troll is best executed with as much subtlety as possible so as not to be detected by the intended target (but amusingly obvious to everyone else) was completely lost in the mainstreaming of the word.

Now it's used mainly as something like "being a dick online" or even without the online part, as if English (and every other language) didn't have enough slang for this behavior already.

I submit that what has happened to the word trolling should be exhibit A in the counter argument against the claim that language evolves over time, or at least challenge the idea that evolves is analogous to "improves" or "becomes better suited to its purpose."

> The crucial quality that a troll is best executed with as much subtlety as possible so as not to be detected by the intended target

Yeah.. noo. Who told you this? This is wrong on so many levels it is hard to know where to begin.

Even the gnaa and the penis bird and all that sort of thing, although typically labeled -1, troll by slashdot's moderation system (because that's the best fitting option in the list - the obvious absurdity ruling out using "flamebait" instead), were really not getting at the original (and semantically unique) sense of the term [0] as it existed during the Usenet days when it first appeared.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/troll.html

"The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it."

I think for me the turning point as an inveterate troll was learning about seriously sociopathic nihilistic groups like Queer [n-word] for Satan who would no-kidding bully and doxx vulnerable people. My attempting to get a rise out of the clueless was nothing compared to that kind of monstrousness.

There are no distinct boundaries between griefing, trolling and flamebaiting. I'd argue the groups with intentionally offensive names are griefers by default. Is intentionally triggering a negative reaction in someone for lulz using an off-topic comment and claiming "it's just a joke, bro" trolling, flamebaiting or griefing? Depends who you ask, but I'm glad none of the overt versions of the three are welcome on HN.

I think I may have given a late estimate for the turning point of the word troll, because even by the time slashdot came around and usenet had already gone into steep decline, the usage has started to shift away from "trolling-as-in-fishing-technique" craftwork and toward "trolling-as-in-attention-seeking-monster's-petty-sadism."

The former requires ever greater refinement to improve upon, while the latter requires merely ever increasing tolerance for banal cruelty, leading to the situation you described.

>> The crucial quality that a troll is best executed with as much subtlety as possible so as not to be detected by the intended target

> Yeah.. noo. Who told you this? This is wrong on so many levels it is hard to know where to begin.

It's literally the classic definition of an internet troll. The whole point was to subtly push other people's buttons to get them to do something interesting.

See this semi-famous example: https://gwern.net/doc/cs/2001-12-02-treginaldgibbons-isyours.... It can and did trigger a lot of geeks' impulse to pedantically correct others, be opinionated (e.g. AOL hate), and defend their hobbies against what they perceived as cultural hostility.

> It's literally the classic definition of an internet troll.

Yeah, nah. Maybe for boomers? Are you "silent generation"?

> Yeah, nah. Maybe for boomers? Are you "silent generation"?

Nice troll.

"uhm, akshally... that is flamebait. HAND" -B1FF

gr8 b8 m8 :)

Nicely done, I completely fell for it.

You got me.

The concept of 'troll' moved from "like a fisherman" to "like under a bridge".

I still remember the wikipedia article on "slashdot trolling phenomena" (yes, it was its own page, not a subsection of the slashdot page!) describing the gnaa as an "organised coalition of slashdot trolls". for some reason, at the time I thought that was the funniest phrase I'd ever seen on wikipedia.

For reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20061013102144/http://en.wikiped...

Wikipedia used to be much more fun.

That makes me think of Reddit where many submissions that ask the audience a question need to have the comment sort order changed to "controversial" to read something interesting.

Ah yes, who can forget the quality curious engaging debate, such as first post!1, hot grits and the GNAA. What wonderful life they brought the place. To your point though, the tools available with reason- based pointing, and meta moderation, were far superior than later forums have.

Communities of people who spend their time together in quality intellectual discussion, like researchers, might still head for the pub, organize barbecues, or go fishing where they just want to blow off steam and make jokes, and among their own people where they can base those jokes on nerdy shared lore. There’s room for both serious things and frivolous things in life.

I feel like I remember good old days before the troll culture arrived. I had a 3-digit id, and remember users like Meeept (no offense, whoever you were) being the beginning of the decline. Maybe it's just rose-colored glasses on my part, though.

frost pist

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