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Comment by adamnemecek | Hacker News Reader

Pro tip, if you equate trolls with neo-Nazis and trolling with hate speech, you are not qualified to speak about either.

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Depends.

Are these the kinds of trolls that hunt people down in the physical world, or send nasty letters to employers to get people fired, or send SWAT teams to people's houses?

All of those have happened. All of those are trolling.

None of those are trolling. Those are harassment. Trolling can be used for harassment but is not the same as harassment.

Judging by what the media has called trolling, I doubt the line is as clear as you seem to think:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_%28Internet%29

Hate to break this to you but media is not always right.

Words are defined through usage, unless they're technical terms, which "troll" is not.

The media both reflects and creates usage. Therefore, yes, it is very much right in this case.

Whining that it's un-PC isn't going to help you.

When it comes to defining what a word means, the popular consensus is always right, and the media both reflects and influences that.

The exception to that is technical terms used in a technical context. That doesn't apply here.

Lol what? You seem to be grasping at straws.

That's basic linguistics. It's not new or controversial among linguists. It's why dictionaries are built by looking at usage and citing sources, as anyone who knows how they're made knows.

Look up descriptive linguistics some time.

Look up "two wrongs don't make a right" some time.

How do you think dictionaries are written?

I don't think this sort of empty, dismissive comment helps anyone. Besides, is there even that much difference between someone who is genuinely hateful and someone who's just saying hateful things because they enjoy making other people upset? If it looks like a duck...

There is a rather huge difference in the psychology of the two. A committed racist is dangerous, while your average troll has some internal issues that have a low danger level. Trolls can escalate, but the type of people they talk about in the article are already there.

"If it looks like a duck..."

I would be interested where you fall on zero tolerance.

IMO there is an enormous difference. I've always defined hatred in terms like "motivated to kill, for real." Less serious is anger. Far less serious is mischief, which is where I feel most trolling sits.

Put another way, if a person is being irritating (in text, at that), and you find yourself feeling terrorized, there's a massive failure of communication occurring.

Yes because trolling is not necessarily hateful. I would go as far as to say that for the most part it isn't.

Agreed. Trolling, in the classic/historical internet sense, is trying to irritate others by baiting them into an online argument that they take very seriously. Trolls are generally pests, but not hateful.

This is a pretty shallow nitpick. The article outlines pretty well what kind of people they mean. Yeah, it's different from the common meaning of "troll" but so what.

> This is a pretty shallow nitpick.

Yeah, I don't think it is.

Your right, the title really doesn't go with the article. Its like seeing a title "Flooding issue on the Japanese coast" and then reading about a tsunami.

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